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25) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2017. The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxviii + 1005 pages.
This volume is intended as a focussed and well-structured volume on areal linguistics. This relates to many other areas such as language contact, typology and historical linguistics to mention the three most directly involved. However, areal linguistics is more than each of these and unifies research into how languages come to share features diachronically and the manner in which this takes place. Areal linguistics is thus both an intersection between different subfields of linguistics and a domain of research in its own right.The topicality of areal linguistics is amply documented by the recent literature from a wide range of scholars with a broad spectrum of language expertise. The current volume will offer both a synthesis of the views in this literature and new perspectives for the field in the future.
24) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2016. Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxxii + 574 pages.
The idea behind this volume is to present a number of chapters which look at the earliest audio recordings for a number of varieties of English, probably from the beginning, or at least from the first half, of the twentieth century. The reason for examining such recordings is that they often show accents prior to key developments of the mid-to-late twentieth century in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland - to mention just a few anglophone countries where this would apply. The opposite may also be the case, i.e. that early audio records do indeed show features thought to be recent. The speakers on early recordings are often of a fairly advanced age offering apparent-time information for varieties spoken in the late nineteenth century. For the study of non-vernacular varieties such recordings can be invaluable. The quality of early recordings do vary considerably and acoustic analysis is not possible with all of them, though auditory analysis can and will be done.
23) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2016. Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 420 pages.
The projected book is intended to offer an overview of all essential matters relating to language and society in Ireland. This includes information on both the English and the Irish languages in Ireland in a holistic sense, i.e. encompassing both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The book is to be divided into three large sections as follows: I Language and society in contemporary Ireland (6 chapters), II Language and society in Irish history (6 chapters), III Sociolinguistic interfaces (5 chapters). This division is intended to facilitate orientation for later readers: those interested in the interaction of social and linguistic factors in present-day Ireland will find this information straight away in the first section, the historical background is then provided in the second for those who wish to delve into the roots of current constellations of language and society. The third section is devoted to additional aspects of the overall theme, e.g. the role of language in film or in translation or literature in Ireland.
22) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2015. Researching Northern English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 483 pages.
The current volume seeks to bring together the leading researchers on varieties of English from the North of England. This field has been the subject of intensive scrutiny during recent years and there have been a number of Northern Englishes workshops reflecting this activity. A number of themes recur in the chapters of the volume, providing it with a clear focus, e.g. the definition of the North of England vis à vis both Scotland and the South of England, the development of specifically urban varieties within the North, the sociolinguistic attitudes and behaviour of present-day speakers within the North, especially with regard to innovations emanating from the South of England as well as the issue of the enregisterment of specific featues from the North of England.
21) Hickey, Raymond 2014. A Dictionary of Varieties of English. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, xxviii + 456 pages).
The current dictionary provides comprehensive coverage of forms of English from recent history (since the beginning of the colonial period, c 1600) and from all anglophone locations throughout the world. The latter group includes varieties of English as a native language (spoken by descendants of settlers who emigrated from the British Isles) and as a second language in countries which generally were former colonies of England, e.g. many states in South and South-East Asia as well as parts of Africa. The historic dimension covers developments in England and the rise of early settler varieties, for instance in North America (in the later USA and Canada) and in the Caribbean, dating back to the early seventeenth century. The study of varieties of English includes various soiolingjuistic perspectives, especially in urban settings. The development of English, triggered by factors such as class, network affiliation, ethnic grouping, is reflected in the coverage of the present dictionary. Apart from over 2,000 definitions the dictionary has both an introduction presenting trends and traditions in the field and a comprehensive, structured bibliography pointing the way for further study.
20) Hickey, Raymond 2014. The Sound Structure of Modern Irish. (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, xiii + 481 pages).
A comprehensive description of the phonology of Irish is given in this book. Based on the main forms of the language, it offers an analysis of the segments and the processes in its sound system. Each section begins with a description of the area of phonology which is the subject - such as stress patterns, phonotactics, epenthesis or metathesis - and then proceeds to consider the special aspects of this subject from a theoretical and typological perspective. The book pays particular attention to key processes in the sound system of modern Irish, such as palatalisation and initial mutation, phenomena which are of relevance to general phonological theory. A typological comparison of several different languages, all of which show palatalisation and/or initial mutation as part of their systems, is also offered. The different forms of Celtic, Slavic languages, Romance dialects and languages along with languages such as Finnish, Fula and Nivkh are considered to find out how processes which are phonetic in origin (external sandhi) can become functionalised and integrated into the morphosyntactic system of a language.
19) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2012. Standards of English. Codified Varieties Around the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 421 pages).
This volume is concerned with the plurality of standard varieties of English across the anglophone world. It consists of 17 contributions which examine the nature of standard English in various countries or regions. In each case the history of English is considered and the manner in which English is codified is the focus of attention. Further cases are viewed where codification did not take place, or only covertly, or where an exonormative model for standard English still applies, especially in the pronunciation of English. The dynamic nature of standard varieties and the inherent variation which they show are additional themes which are shared by all contributions.
18) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2012. Areal Features of the Anglophone World (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 503 pages).
The intention of the present volume is to unite the research of a range of scholars who have been working on features of non-standard, vernacular English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. Features common to an area can be due to (i) shared dialect input, (ii) common but separate innovations after settlement, or (iii) area-internal diffusion from one variety to another and/or others. The relative weighting of these factors is an important topic in the book and is a key focus in the 17 chapters. The book is divided into two large blocks, the first one consisting of case studies (8 chapters) and the second with features complexes (9 chapters). The former look at major anglophone locations from an areal perspective while the latter examine linguistic categories and features with a few to determine whether these could be areally based or not.
17) Hickey, Raymond 2011. The Dialects of Irish. Study of a Changing Landscape (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 508 pages + DVD).
This book offers a comprehensive overview of forms of modern Irish within a general linguistic framework. Starting with information on the sociolinguistics of modern Irish and on the overall sound system of the language, it then proceeds with a tripartite division of the present-day language into northern, western and southern Irish. It gives specific information on the features of each dialect and considers many sub-divisions, using maps and tables to illustrate clearly what is the subject of discussion. There are several innovations in the book, such as a system of lexical sets which facilitate the description and analysis of variation and change in modern Irish. A number of further issues are focused on in the book, such as the possibility of dialect reconstruction and the use of place-name evidence for determining the earlier distribution of Irish. Additional historical and background information is provided so that scholars and students without any previous knowledge of the language can readily grasp the themes and issues discussed.
16) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2011. Irish English in Today’s World. Special issue of English Today, Vol. 106, June 2011. (Cambridge: University Press).
A set of eight contributions in this volume look at the position and nature of Irish English in the present-day world. An overview chapter by the editor opens the volume and outlines the themes which characterise research into Irish English. There then follow two chapters on grammar which look at structural details of Irish English. Language policy and language planning is considered in a further chapter as well as issues surrounding the notion of standard Irish English. How pragmatics differs from other varieties of English is the focus of another chapter and the manner in which specific forms of Irish English are used in translation is the theme of yet another. The volume closes with a consideration of applied aspects, in particular with Irish English in the context of foreign language teaching.
15) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2011. Researching the Languages of Ireland. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 351 pages).
The chapters of this volume are intended to offer a representative cross section of current research on the languages of Ireland, specifically Irish and English with Ulster Scots a significant addition to the latter. The chapters span a considerable range. Those dealing with Irish concern themselves with the history of the language and the classification of Irish, with the acquisition of Irish as a first language and with the syntactic and lexical structure of present-day Irish. The chapters with English as their focus encompass matters such as the use of limited databases for linguistic analysis, questions of language contact, the comparison of Irish English with other varieties, the issue of standard Irish English and the position of Ulster Scots in present-day Ireland.
14) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2010. Varieties of English in Writing. The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 378 pages).
The present volume has two major and related aims, one methodological and one documentary (1) Methodological aim: To discuss in the light of recent insights and methods in linguistics the problems and opportunities associated with documents of different varieties throughout the anglophone world when used as linguistic evidence. Such documents can be of a literary nature (as with dialect portrayal, for instance) or they can be non-fictional, for example with diaries, travelogues, official records, etc. (2) Documentary aim: To document the history of varieties in the anglophone world (both in the British Isles and overseas) and show how written documents have contributed to our picture of the emergernce of these varieties.
The concern of the current volume is primarily with the assessing of written texts - both fictional and non-fictional - as linguistic evidence for earlier forms of varieties of English. The question of how genuine written representations are forms a central theme and the techniques and methodology which can be employed to determine this is discussed up front.
13) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2010. Eighteenth-Century English. Ideology and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 426 pages).
12) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2010. The Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley-Blackwell, 863 pages).
The Handbook of Language Contact encompasses every area of language contact in a systematic and focused approach with some 40 specially commissioned essays by a team of globally renowned scholars who offer a wide-ranging exploration of the field. The volume contains numerous case studies from languages across the world, attesting to the variety and linguistic significance of this subject area. This comprehensive handbook is structured into sections exploring the place of contact studies within linguistics as a whole, the value of such studies for research into language change, and language contact in the framework of language and society. The volume also offers a representative cross-section of individual studies which reappraise the role of language contact in their respective contexts.
11) Hickey, Raymond 2007. Irish English. History and Present-Day Forms. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xx + 504 pages).
This book offers an overview of Irish English in both its historical and contemporary aspects. It is divided into the following sections: 1) Introduction, a general orientation in the field, 2) Languages in medieval Ireland (with the Kildare Poems and the Forth and Bargy dialect), 3) Language in Ulster, 4) The emergence of Irish English, 5) Present-day Irish English (with Dublin English) and 6) Transportation overseas. Throughout the book certain issues play a central role such as the relative weight accorded to contact and retention in explaining features of Irish English, the continuity in the history of Irish English, regional differentiation in the south of Ireland and the description current sociolinguistic developments in contemporary Ireland, above all in the capital Dublin. For all these sections new data sources have been used to provide attestations of the structures discussed. Attention is also paid to the transportation of Irish English to key regions of the anglophone world outside of Europe such as Canada, the United States and the Caribbean.
10) Hickey, Raymond 2005. Dublin English. Evolution and Change (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 270pp. + CD-ROM).
The intention of the present book is twofold. On the one hand it offers a description of the history of English in the capital of Ireland since it was first introduced to Dublin in the late 12th century and on the other hand the book describes the present-day varieties of English to be found in the city. All the historical data which is available is presented for linguistic analysis with a view to throwing light on Dublin English. This material consists in the main of emigrant letters and local letters by Dubliners and literary attestations of Irish English by Dublin writers as well as prescriptive comments on language in the capital by various authors such as the elocutionist Thomas Sheridan. The synchronic section of the book deals with the current changes in pronunciation which have characterised the development of Dublin English in the past decade or two. To this end the data from a broad-based survey of Dublin English is presented and analysed. The shifts in Dublin English are also placed in a wider context and compared with similiar contemporary changes in other major anglophone cities. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM which contains a suite of powerful programs and all the recordings of Dublin English used for the current book. The data consists of over 300 sound files, over 200 survey questionnaires and informants' maps and over 100 spoken assessment tests. By means of the supplied software users can examine the original data on their PC or Macintosh computer. The programs offer an easy gateway to the data in the form of a tour of Dublin English as well as much background information on English in Dublin along with overview information on the language in the rest of Ireland. The software can be used in Windows program form (with installation to hard disk) or in Java form (without any installation).
9) Hickey, Raymond 2004. A Sound Atlas of Irish English. (Berlin/NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter, 171pp. + DVD).
A Sound Atlas of Irish English offers a unique and comprehensive audio overview of the English language as spoken in present-day Ireland. In all, there are over 1,500 recordings which were made between the mid 1990s and 2002. The recordings cover both genders and all ages (from 11 to over 80). Each county of the 32 in Ireland is represented and there is a proper spread according to population. The capitals, Belfast and Dublin, have large numbers of speakers, making the sound atlas particularly suitable for sociolinguistic work within a variationist framework.
All the data can be accessed easily from the supplied DVD by means of a Java application which allows the user to browse among the data by county and to view and listen to lexical set realisations and free text. The DVD contains much additional information about Irish English - varieties, historical development, current distribution, etc. - as does the accompanying book which offers many details concerning specific features of forms of Irish English and information on the methodology used for the sound atlas. The software will run under any version of Windows as well as on Macintosh computers and under the Linux operating system. It may be, but need not be, installed to the hard disk of a computer.
8) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2004. Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialects. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 712 pages).
The main concern of this volume is to offer a re-assessment of dialect input in the formation of extraterritorial varieties of English and to examine further scenarios in which forms of English arose overseas, above all in South and South-East Asia. It begins with a consideration of the development of English in the British Isles with a review of key features from regional Britain, Scotland and Ireland which appear in more or less altered form at anglophone locations outside of Britain. There follow sections on the New World (9 chapters on Canada, the United States, the Caribbean) and the Southern Hemisphere (6 chapters on South Africa, the Southern Atlantic, Australia/New Zealand and Melanesia) as well as three chapters on English in Asia in which various issues from the area of transported dialects and the New Englishes are discussed by different authors.
7) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) Motives for Language Change. (Cambridge: University Press, 2003, 286 pages).
In a series of 15 chapters a variety of issues in language change are dealt with by different authors. The contributions are grouped thematically and include the following divisions 1) Linguistic models and language change, 2) The social context for language change, 3) Grammaticalisation, 4) Contact-based explanations, 5) The typological perspective. The approaches employed by the contributors vary, some are model-oriented while others are largely data-driven, reflecting the eclectic nature of research in the field.
6) Hickey, Raymond (ed.) Collecting Views on Language Change. Special issue of Language Sciences. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2002, 302 pages).
With a series of contributions dealing largely, but not exclusively, with the history of English a number of different contributors examine specific issues in language change, drawing together insights from recent research in the field. The range is from theory-oriented treatments of problems in English historical linguistics to sociolinguistic analyses of key periods in English history. Many of the contributions deal with matters which have been recurring themes of Roger Lass´s writings such as internal and external factors in language change.
5) Hickey, Raymond 2002. A Source Book for Irish English (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 541 pages).
A whole range of references relating to Irish English in all its aspects are gathered together here and in the majority of cases annotations are supplied. The book also has a detailed introduction dealing the history of Irish English, the documentation available and contains an overview of the themes in Irish English which have occupied linguists working in the field. Various appendixes offer information on the history of Irish English studies and biographical notes on scholars from this area. All the bibliographical material is contained on the accompanying CD-ROM along with appropriate software for processing the databases and texts in which this material is contained. The databases are fully searchable, information can be exported at will and customised extracts can be created by users.
4) Hickey, Raymond and Stanislaw Puppel (eds) 1997. Language History and Linguistic Modelling. A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2121 pages).
2) Habilitation 1985. (post-doctoral degree). Kontakt, Konservatismus, Konvergenz. Eine phonologische Typologie des südirischen Englischen. [Contact, conservatism, convergence. A phonological typology of southern Irish English] (University of Bonn, 463 pages).
1) PhD thesis. 1980. Satzstrukturen des Deutschen und Englischen, eine kontrastive Analyse im Rahmen der Dependenzgrammatik. [Sentence structures in German and English, a contrastive analysis within the framework of dependency grammar] (University of Kiel, 251 pages).
Books (computing)
7) Hickey, Raymond Corpus Presenter. Processing software for language analysis (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), 292 pages with CD-ROM.
The Corpus Presenter software suite can be used to compile text corpora and to carry out retrieval tasks on any corpus, no matter what its source or how it is organised. The suite is designed to have a maximally open architecture and to deal with files in ASCII, RTF or HTML format. The package consists of more than 20 programs which fulfil various tasks in the field of corpus processing and which can be accessed from a single user-friendly program launcher.The main program is called Corpus Presenter and is intended for viewing and interogating corpora. Provision has been made for the retrieval of syntactic information with frame searches. The processing of lexical information is facilitated by the availability of a number of database modules within the program suite, reverse dictionaries and different types of concordances can also be generated. The Corpus Presenter package also allows tagging of corpora, in an automatic, semi-automatic or manual mode so that it can be useful to those linguists compiling corpora in which grammatical information is to be incorporated in advance of distribution.
Hickey, Raymond A Corpus of Irish English (packaged with the Corpus Presenter)
The present corpus has been assembled with the intention of placing the majority of available texts for Irish English from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century at the disposal of interested scholars. The corpus encompasses a number of genres, from 14th century poetry to drama in the modern period with additional material such as glossaries of dialect material and a regional novel from the early 19th century (Castle Rackrent). The material stems both from Irish and non-Irish authors. The latter form a group of writers who attempted to represent Irish English in fictional prose. The most famous of these is Shakespeare who in the Four Nations Scene from Henry V has an Irish character (Captain Macmorris) with salient features of 16th century Irish English. Of equal interest are the attempts of Irish writers during the 19th and early 20th centuries to render the speech of rural and urban inhabitants in as realistic a manner as possible hence the inclusion of plays by Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O´Casey.
There is a dedicated website for the Corpus Presenter software suite, click here.
6) Hickey, Raymond FoxPro für Windows. Anwendung und Programmierung. (Bonn: Addison Wesley, 1994), 625 pages.
5) Hickey, Raymond Datenbankverwaltung auf dem PC. Eine praxisorientierte Einführung für jeden Anwender. (Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1993), 261 pages.
4) Hickey, Raymond Datenbankverwaltung für Jedermann. Das universelle Softwarepaket Vieweg DatenbankManager für Xbase-kompatible Datenbanken. (Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1993), 255 pages.
3) Hickey, Raymond Clipper 5.2 Programmierung. Datenbank-Applikationen leicht entwickeln. (Vaterstetten: IWT-Verlag, 1993), 505 pages.
2) Hickey, Raymond FontSoft. Ein Editor für DOS-Zeichensätze. (München: Addison Wesley, 1992), 282 pages. Expanded English version: LinguaFont. Language Fonts and Design Software. (Bergen: Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, 1993), 374 pages.
1) Hickey, Raymond Lexa. Corpus Data Processing. 3 Vols. (Bergen, Norwegian Centre for Computing in the Humanities, 1993). Vol.1 Lexical Analysis and Information Retrieval, 303 pages. Vol.2 Database and Corpus Management, 246 pages. Vol.3 Utility Library, 210 pages. Addendum, 34 pages.
60) ‘The pragmatics of grand in Irish English’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2017.
In the past two centuries the use of the adjective grand underwent a specific semantic expansion in Irish English. Apart from the meaning of ‘displaying grandeur’, the adjective came to mean ‘fine’, ‘alright’, ‘in good form’, both as an expression of the speaker‘s situation and as a reference to that of the addressee. This development can be shown to represent a case of subjectification, as seminally described by Elizabeth Traugott in various publications (e.g. Traugott 1995), with the element of intersubjectification arising somewhat later (Traugott 2003). Via the examination of various texts, this study looks at the diachronic development of grand in its various uses and the rise of the Irish English extension with a consideration of possible precursors and parallels in other varieties. The subjective and intersubjective uses of grand are labelled ‘approving grand’ and ‘reassuring grand’ respectively and are shown to be in keeping with other features of Irish discourse structure and pragmatics.
60) ‘Early recordings of Irish English', in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016: 199-231).
60) ‘Irish English and the English writing system', in: Vivan Cook and Des Ryan (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System. (London: Routledge, 2016: 317-331).
60) ‘English in Ireland: development and varieties', in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 3-40.
60) ‘Society, language and Irish emigration’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Sociolinguistics in Ireland. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 244-265).
59) ‘The pragmatics of Irish English and Irish’, in: McCafferty, Kevin, Carolina Amador Moreno and Elaine Vaughan (eds) Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015: 17-36).
58) ‘English as a contact language in Ireland and Scotland’, in: Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier (eds) English as a Contact Language. (Cambridge: University Press, 2013: 88-105).
57 ‘The English language in Ireland’, in: Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 90: 881-887. Special issue The Languages of the 27, edited by Wim Vandenbussche and Piet van Sterkenburg.
This is a short overview of the main dates and the chief development in the history of English in Ireland. It is an additional section to the chapter on British English in the current volume and has been added as an appendix to provide a concise discussion of the specific features and nature of Irish English.
56) ‘Rural and urban Ireland: A question of language?’, in: Irene Gilsenan Nordin (ed.) Urban and Rural Landscapes in Modern Ireland: Language, Literature and Culture. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012: 17-38).
55) ‘Areal features of English in Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Areal Features of the Anglophone World. (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2012, 79-107).
The notion of linguistic area (from German Sprachbund, lit. ‘language federation’) is one which is often invoked when dealing with languages which share features and are found in a geographically contiguous area. The present paper considers to what extent this notion applies to the island of Ireland which in its history and at present has been home to a number of languages. The main two are Irish and English and the relationship between these has been especially close given that there was a historical shift from the former to the latter. However, the influence has been in both directions so that areal features have arisen in Ireland. In addition the Ulster Scots input from the seventeenth century came under the influence of both Irish and southern Irish English and thus engaged in Ireland’s linguistic areality.
54) ‘Standard Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Standards of English. Codified Varieties Around the World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 96-116).
Abstract This study is concerned with examining the de facto standard of English used in the south of Ireland. Here there is no explicitly codified standard of English, i.e. there are no guides to standard Irish English, no publications dealing with the subject. Nonetheless, the population are aware of what features belong to the non-stigmatised variety of Irish English, a form based on middle class usage from the first half of the twentieth century. This standard exists by contrast with more vernacular varieties which in their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary differ from the standard. The non-colloquial variety of Dublin English arose due to the process of supraregionalisation during which the majority of vernacular features were removed by the rising middle classes of Ireland who came increasingly to enjoy higher levels of education during the nineteenth century. The supraregional variety which came to be accepted as the standard of Irish English occupies an intermediate position between vernacular forms within Ireland and the extranational norm in England.
53) ‘Present and future horizons for Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Irish English in Today’s World. Special issue of English Today, Vol 106, June 2011, 3-16.
The English language was first taken to Ireland in the late twelfth century and enjoyed a modest position in late medieval Irish society, a position which betrayed no sign of the later dominance of English in Ireland as in so many countries to which the language was taken during the period of English colonialism. The fate of the English language after initial settlement was determined by the existence of Irish and Anglo-Norman as widely spoken languages in the country. Irish was the continuation of forms of Celtic taken to Ireland in the first centuries BCE and the native language of the great majority of the population at the time settlers from Britain first arrived in Ireland. The following centuries experienced a shift from Irish to English which was never to be reversed and led to Ireland becoming an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. The situation today is one dominated by (i) the north-south divide (Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) and (ii) the rural - urban split, above all Dublin versus the rest of the country. The language of the capital has been especially dynamic and has undergone major changes since the early 1990s due to the expansion of the city and the great increase in prosperity, at least up until 2008.
52) ‘The languages of Ireland. An integrated view’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) 2011. Researching the Languages of Ireland. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011, 1-45).
This study offers an overview of all the languages which have been spoken on the island of Ireland since the earliest documents (runic-like forms of Celtic from the first centuries CE). It considers the structures of these languages, the ethnic groups who spoke them and the manner in which these interacted with each other. The mutual influence of languages in Ireland a the central focus, not just that of Irish on English, but such historical relationships as that between Anglo-Norman and Irish as well as Latin and Old Norse.
51) ‘Ulster Scots in present-day Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Researching the Languages of Ireland. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011, 291-323).
Of all the varieties of English taken to Ireland since the 17th century, Ulster Scots is that which has retained a very distinct profile and which can be unambiguously linked to related present-day varieties in western and lowland Scotland. Undoubtedly, Ulster Scots – especially in its rural forms – is quite separate from other varieties of English in the north of Ireland, let alone in the south. Its divergent nature has meant that much debate has taken place concerning its status as a language or ‘simply’ a dialect. In addition there has been a conscisous urban revival in recent years which has sought to expand the lexical basis of the dialect by artificial creations and thus ‘create’ a fully-fledged language. This study offers an assessment of the attempts at revival and expanding Ulster Scots and consider the vital question of its acceptance in Northern Irish society.
50) ‘Irish English in early modern drama. The birth of a linguistic stereotype’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed). Varieties of English in Writing. The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, 121-138).
The rise of the linguistic stereotype of Irish English in drama written in English by English-speaking authors is the topic of this contribution. It considers a variety of features found in dramatic representations of Irish characters and checks these against non-standard speech in other text types, notably emigrant letters and court proceedings. The question of whether such representations can be regarded as genuine forms a central focus of the study. There are also additional issues considered here, such as the survival and demise of certain non-standard features in varieties of Irish English and the relationship of contact features (from Irish) to those non-standard features which most likely derive from dialect input from England and Scotland.
49) ‘The Englishes of Ireland. Emergence and Transportation’, in: Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes (London: Routledge, 2010, 76-95).
This paper offers an outline of the development of the English language in Ireland from its earliest stages with particular emphasis on the language shift which has characterised the emerging forms of English in Ireland over the centuries. The influence of the Scots input on English in the north of Ireland is also be considered. The representation of different forms of Irish English in writing is also examined as well as the language of the capital Dublin (Hickey 2005). The chapter has furthermore two additional foci 1) The spread of English from Ireland during the colonial period. Since the mid 17th century forms of Irish English have been transported to overseas locations and have provided an input into new forms of English developing at these external locations. 2) The development of supraregional Irish English, an embryonic standard of English in Ireland. The features of this non-local English are examined and compared with other similar varieties across the anglophone world. In particular, the question of mutual intelligibility is examined and the place of Irish English in the arena of World Englishes is considered.
48) ‘English in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Eighteenth-Century English. Ideology and Change. (Cambridge: University Press, 2010, 235-268)
This chapter provides an overview of the development of English in both the north and south of Ireland during the eighteenth century. It looks in detail at the textual records for Irish English in this period as well as considering the rise of Ulster Scots. Furthermore, other forms of English in eighteenth-century Ireland, notably the extinct dialect of Forth and Bargy, are considered. The significance of English in eighteenth-century Ireland is that this is the period before the upheavals of the nineteenth century and before the last great push of language shift.
47) ‘Modal verbs in English and Irish’, in: Esa Penttilä and Heli Paulasto (eds) Language Contacts meet English Dialects. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 259-274).
Abstract This article presents an overview of modality types in English and how they are expressed in Irish. The contrast of the two languages is important given that there was a major language shift from Irish to English over the past few centuries. However, it would appear the modal system of Irish did not have any significant influence on English in Ireland, probably because the means for expressing modality in Irish as very different from English and usually avail of prepositional pronouns with the verb tá ‘be’, e.g. Tá fúm dul ann [is under-me go.NON-FINITE in-it] ‘I must go there’.
46) ‘Weak segments in Irish English’, in Donka Minkova (ed.) Phonological Weakness in English. From Old to Present-day English. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 116-29).
The varieties of English spoken in southern Ireland are noted for the reduction in the articulation of alveolar segments, chiefly /t/. This has a long history and is amply attested in the textual record. Vernacular speech in the capital Dublin shows alveolar stop lenition to a more considerable degree than do less regionally bound varieties of Irish English. This lenition is clearly organised as a cline on which lenited segments increase in sonority. The precise manifestation of lenition depends on syllable position, being disfavoured in onsets but also in covered positions such as immediately before stops. There are also manner restrictions on lenition prohibiting it before /s/ because sequences of two fricatives are not legal. On the cline of lenition there are different realisations and the extent to which a variety shows these depends on its degree of vernacularity. The range is from non-lenition (faithful representation of segments from the lexical input) to deletion of segments. There are furthermore lexicalised instances of advanced lenition which occur in the supraregional variety of English in Ireland which normally only shows the first stage of lenition, i.e. frication of stops with the retention of all other articulatory features. In this contribution both a phonetic analysis of lenition and a consideration of the external factors (degree of vernacularity) which determine the range of lenition is offered.
45) ‘Feature loss in 19th century Irish English’, in Terttu Nevalainen, Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Minna Korhonen (eds) The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, 229-43).
The current contribution is concerned with the disappearance of a number of dialect features from the English language in Ireland during the course of the 19th century. At the outset of this century there were many archaic and dialectal features from earlier input varieties of English as well as transfer features from Irish which had been carried over by bilinguals during the language shift to English. In the course of the 19th century a native middle class arose in Ireland due to the emancipation of, and general education for the Catholic population. This in turn led to the emergence of a supraregional variety of English in which many of the earlier features were removed and/or replaced by more mainstream ones, stemming from southern British usage. Developments were not always straightforward and many features were relegated to vernacular varieties or to positions of slighter salience, thus escaping censure by later generations. The consideration of just what paths was taken by what features forms the backbone of this contribution.
44) ‘“What strikes the ear” Thomas Sheridan and regional pronunciation’, in Susan Fitzmaurice and Donka Minkova (eds) Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, 385-411).
The role of the elocutionist and grammarian Thomas Sheridan in the rise of sociolinguistic censure is considered in the present contribution. Sheridan's attitude to non-standard features in Irish English in the late 18th century is examined to see how prescriptive notions of language use seemed to be fleshed out during this time. The negative comments by Sheridan on the speech of his fellow Irishmen is considered in some detail to see to what extent prescriptive remarks such as these can be used to gain a glimpse of regional pronunciations at the beginning of the late modern period. The possible influence of Sheridan’s strictures on the development of Irish English during the 19th century is also considered.
43) ‘Southern Irish English’, in: David Britain (ed.) Language in the British Isles. 2nd edition. (Cambridge: University Press, 2007, 135-51).
Abstract Following on the article by Alan Bliss in the first edition of Language in the British Isles (1984) the present article attempts to offer an update by taking into account the very considerable research done in Irish English studies in the two decades since this volume originally appeared. Particular emphasis is placed on sociolinguistic developments in Dublin English and on issues in the study of Irish English which are of general interest to variety linguists.
42) ‘Dartspeak and Estuary English. Advanced metropolitan speech in Ireland and England’, in Ute Smit, Stefan Dollinger, Julia Hüttner, Ursula Lutzky, Gunther Kaltenböck (eds). Tracing English through time: explorations in language variation. (Vienna: Braumüller, 2007, 179-90).
The present paper is concerned with two putative varieties of English in London and Dublin, namely Estuary English and Dartspeak. It considers what linguistic features can be associated with these labels and examines the parallels and differences between the two forms of English, both from an internal linguistic and an external sociolinguistic point of view. In particular the motivation for the rise of these varieties is considered. The comparison between Dublin and London shows that the new variety of Dublin English has been triggered by the desire of the non-local speakers in the capital to dissociate from those who have a strong local identification and accent. The developments in and around London are more of a compromise between strongly local forms of English and a standard - Received Pronunciation - which has been perceived in recent decades as increasingly stand-offish and class-conscious.
41) ‘Irish English, research and developments’, in: Études Irlandaises. Special issue Irish English. Varieties and Variations, edited by Maryvonne Boisseau and Françoise Canon-Roger, pp.11-32.
The current chapter is intended as an overview of the main focus of research on Irish English to date. This variety has been well served by scholars in recent decades with a flourishing of interest stemming from various approaches to analysing English in Ireland. After an introduction, there is a section on the early history of the variety of Irish English (Section 2). This is followed by a consideration of the main linguistic event in the history of Ireland, the shift from Irish to English for the great majority of the population (Section 3). In keeping with new trends in Irish English scholarship, shared features across the country as a whole are then reviewed (Section 4). Following on from this, there is a section on the interpretation of features, considering in particular their possible sources (Section 5). Such reflections are relevant to the question of whether language contact or retention of dialect input are the source for features of Irish English. The last section looks at recent changes in Dublin English (Section 7) which are having a profound influence on the course of non-local varieties of English in the south of the country. A conclusion summarises these developments and points to other areas of interest in the field of language studies and English in Ireland.
40) ‘Contact, shift and language change. Irish English and South African Indian English’, in Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) Celtic Englishes IV. (Potsdam: University Press, 2006, 234-58).
In order to determine the likelihood of sources, the salient features of Irish English and South African English are compared with each other. Both varieties owe their existence to a shift from an original indigenous language to English. The relevant populations in both countries initially acquired English in manners which were largely similar, i.e. in a process of imperfect second language learning in adulthood. For these reasons the structures in both kinds of English are considered with a view to whether they might have their source in the background languages (substratum interference) or in the nature of the sociolinguistic situation in which the shift took place. As always, multiple causation must be considered. In the case of Irish English, archaic and/or regional input from Britain must also be allowed for as a possible source.
39) ‘Irish English in the context of previous research’, in: Anne Barron and Klaus Schneider (eds) The pragmatics of Irish English. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005, 17-44).
This overview article opens with a sketch of the history of Irish English studies and an outline of the issues in this field as well as a brief discussion of terminology. An historical sletch traces the origins of English in Ireland through to the present-day, dealing essentially with the language shift from Irish to English which is responsible for many of the salient features of Irish English. The article also looks at areal features and attempts an interpretation of features which could either have a contact or an English regional source.
38) ‘English in Ireland’, in: D. Alan Cruse, Franz Hundsnurscher, Michael Job and Peter R. Lutzeier (eds) Lexikologie-Lexicology. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005, 1256-60).
Abstract This handbook overview begins with some historical remarks concerning the development of Irish English, distinguishing between retentions from regional English input and borrowings from Irish, the author then looks at the function of specifically Irish English lexis on different levels of formality and in public contexts in Ireland. The question of Irish loans outside of Ireland and some onomastic matters are also dealt with.
37) ‘Development and diffusion of Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 82-117).
Abstract This chapter from the volume on transported dialects is concerned with offering a fresh assessment of both the development of Irish English since the late Middle Ages and of its role as dialect input to extraterritorial varieties of English which have developed throughout the world in the last four centuries. A series of phonological and morphosyntactic features are examined and the sources for these which have been suggested in the literature on varieties are weighed up against the possibility of Irish English origin. The likelihood of Irish input is regarded as dependent on the nature of the community at the new location and the period at which this input was prevalent, thus in Newfoundland the influence from Irish English was considerable but for general American English it is slight as the large numbers of (southern) Irish immigrants arrived after the formative period of English there.
36) ‘The phonology of Irish English’, in: Clive Upton (ed.) Handbook of Varieties of English. The British Isles. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, 47-76).
Abstract An overview of the sound systems of the main varieties of Irish English is to be found in this article. It deals with English in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland and examines both rural and urban varieties in both these regions. Special attention is given to change in southern Irish English. The treatment of all varieties uses lexical sets to discuss individual features. There are a number of sound files on the CD-ROM accompanying the book which provides acoustic illustrations of the different forms of Irish English.
35) ‘What’s cool in Irish English? Linguistic change in contemporary Ireland’, in: Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) Celtic Englishes III. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003, 357-373).
The subject of the present paper is the set of changes in the sound system of Dublin English which have been in evidence in the past ten years or so and which are spreading quickly throughout the entire country. What one is dealing with here are shifts in the phonological space of vowels which have already led to a major re-alignment of the vowel system of mainstream Dublin English with a retraction of low vowels and a raising of back vowels. These changes are, however, part of a larger scheme in which the phonological profile of Dublin English is being radically altered on a broad front. The changes are of general linguistic interest because they represent a case of dissociation as a type of change, that is the motivation for the shifts would appear to be a distancing on the part of fashionable Dublin English speakers from those who speak the colloquial form of English in the capital. Given the social dominance of Dublin over the rest of the country, the changes in English there are being adopted in the rest of the Republic of Ireland and a new form of supraregional English is establishing itself rapidly.
34) ‘Dublin and Middle English’, in: Peter J. and Angela M. Lucas (eds) Middle English. From tongue to text. Selected papers from the Third International Conference on Middle English: Language and Text held at Dublin, Ireland, 1-4 July 1999. (Frankfurt: Lang, 2002, 187-200).
Abstract This article is concerned with examining Dublin English from the point of view of its considerable vintage. The metropolitan variety of English in Ireland goes back to the late 12th century and has survived ever since, albeit with periods (the 15th and 16th centuries) in which the Irish language made serious inroads into the capital. Many archaic features can still be discerned in Dublin English, especially in phonology and to a lesser extent in grammar and vocabulary. Such characteristics as the use of alveolar stops for dental fricatives, the distinction of short vowels before /r/, the existence of unshifted /u/ as well as a centralised onset for /ai/ and unshifted values for Middle English /e:/ offer evidence of the archaic nature of (local) Dublin English.
33) ‘Historical input and the regional differentiation of English in the Republic of Ireland’, in: Katja Lenz and Ruth Möhlig (eds) Of dyuersitie & chaunge of langage. Essays presented to for Manfred Görlach on the occasion of his 65th birthday.. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002, 199-211).
Abstract Although the north of Ireland has been described exhaustively from the point of view of regional distinctions, the Republic of Ireland has not experienced anything like the same degree of attention from linguists, despite promising beginnings like that of Henry (1958). The present article is a modest attempt to redress this imbalance by considering the salient features of English in the east, south/south-west and west of Ireland along with the large midland area. The differences are seen in relation to English settlement patterns and the presence of Irish in many areas outside the east until fairly recent times.
32) ‘The Atlantic edge. The relationship between Irish English and Newfoundland English’, English World-Wide, 23:2, 281-314.
Abstract The intention of the present article is to examine the linguistic features of the Irish-derived community in contemporary Newfoundland and relate these to the varieties of Irish English in the south east of Ireland, the region from which most of the Irish settlers emigrated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The nature of South-West English — the second area of the British Isles which provided input to Newfoundland — is also considered and contrasted with south-east Irish English. The body of the article consists of a description of key features from phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis which are suspected of occurring in both Ireland and Newfoundland. In addition the possibility of retentions and of independent developments in Canada are also considered.
31) ‘The South-East of Ireland. A neglected region of dialect study’, in: Kirk, John and Dónall Ó Baoill (eds) Language links: the languages of Scotland and Ireland. Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, 2 (Belfast: Queen´s University, 2001, 1-22).
Abstract There are several reasons why the study of the south-east of Ireland is a rewarding enterprise. From a historical point of view one can recall that the first settlers from England in the late 12th century arrived in this corner of the country and that English probably never died out here, certainly not in the cities from Dublin to Waterford which were inside the medieval Pale and where there is a continuity of English into the modern period. Another important reason for studying the English of this region is that the south-east, specifically the counties of Waterford, Wexford and south Kilkenny were the catchment areas for those migrant fishing labourers who went to Newfoundland in the 18th and early 19th century and whose speech formed the basis for that of the Irish community there.
30) ‘Language contact and typological difference. Transfer between Irish and Irish English’, in: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds) Language contact and the history of English (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001, 131-69).
Abstract Treatments of contact-induced change do not always take the typological makeup of donor and receiving languages into account. If this is done, however, then the nature of the contact process (at pivotal points in the structure of the donor language) and the likelihood of the successful transfer can be better described. A variety of well-known features from the phonology and morphosyntax of Irish English are examined from this typological perspective to see if this approach can further our understanding of how these features arose. The article also contains a general discussion of examples of contact-induced change which have appeared in linguistic literature in the recent past.
29) ‘Dissociation as a form of language change’, European Journal of English Studies (4:3), 2000, 303-15.
Abstract The desire of speakers to separate themselves linguistically from another adjacent group of speakers is considered in the present article. The group which is active is normally that with higher social status and power and a characterisation of the situation in contemporary Dublin is offered to illustrate a typical dissociation scenario. A holistic interpretation of the current changes in English in the capital is offered which furthers the understanding of the motivation and patterning of these changes.
28) ‘Salience, stigma and standard’, in: Laura Wright (ed.) The development of standard English 1300-1800. Theories, descriptions, conflicts. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 57-72).
Abstract The concern of the present article is to consider how features come to be viewed as salient (noticeable) for speakers of a dialect and then how such features are either eradicated in a process of supraregionalisation or relegated to the vernacular mode. Examples are given from the history of Irish English to illustrate the points made and a series of general criteria for salience are listed and discussed with regard to varieties of English as a whole.
27) ‘Models for describing aspect in Irish English’, in: Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) The Celtic Englishes II. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000, 97-116).
Abstract After beginning with a review of different approaches to describing aspect put forward by Filppula, Harris, and Kallen in particular, this paper then offers an alternative method of dealing with the immediate and resultative perfectives in Irish English: a prototype interpretation in which the distinctions between the two aspectual types are not binary but scalar with examples representing good or bad fits of the prototype. The habitual aspect is also treated and the view that, historically, Irish speakers, engaged in shifting to English, refunctionalised periphrastic do is put forward. Originally delivered as a paper at the Second International Colloquium on Celtic Englishes, University of Potsdam, 23-27 September 1998.
26) ‘Ireland as a linguistic area’, in: James P. Mallory (ed.) Language in Ulster. Special issue of Ulster Folklife (45), (Holywood, Co. Down: Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, 1999, 36-53).
Abstract An attempt is made here to list features which occur across the island of Ireland both in the northern and southern parts. The emphasis is on the commonalities in varieties of Irish English rather than on differences. The question of Irish as a possible donor source for key features of English is considered. There is a detailed discussion of features from various linguistic levels along with a weighting of these features in terms of linguistic significance to see to what extent the entire island could be considered a linguistic area.
25) ‘Dublin English: Current changes and their motivation’, in: Paul Foulkes and Gerry Docherty (eds) Urban voices. (London: Edward Arnold, 1999, 265-81).
Abstract As one of a series of articles in a volume on urban varieties of contemporary English the current article offers a synchronic description of Dublin English and the major changes it is going through. The independence of Irish English from other varieties elsewhere in the British Isles is stressed and the changes are seen as separate developments motivated by the desire of fashionable Dubliners to dissociate themselves from lower-class speakers and not by a putative standardisation process in Dublin English.
24) ‘Development and change in Dublin English’, in: Ernst Håkon Jahr (ed.) Historical sociolinguistics. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1999, 209-43).
Abstract The historical development of English in the capital of the Republic of Ireland and the current changes which it is undergoing are the topic of the present article. The author starts with a consideration of previous stages of Dublin English, especially what we know from the 18th century through the comments by Thomas Sheridan in his Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language of 1781. The contrast between strongly local forms of English in Dublin and that of more fashionable quarters of the city is dealt with in detail and the changes are seen as an attempt by the latter to dissociate themselves from the former in the manner in which they pronounce English.
23) ‘The Dublin vowel shift and the historical perspective’, in: Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (eds) English Historical Linguistics 1996. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1998, 79-106).
Abstract A systematic description of the set of current changes in Dublin English — the Dublin vowel shift — is offered to begin with here and these are considered as a reaction to the historical development of local Dublin English from at least the beginning of the early modern period. The manner in which the current change is taking place, the precise nature of those participating, the relationship between Dublin English and that outside of the capital are just some of the issues dealt with in detail. The article closes with a consideration of the vowel shift within the framework of different theories of language change.
22) ‘The computer analysis of medieval Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey, Merja Kytö, Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen (eds) Tracing the trail of time. Proceedings of the conference on diachronic corpora, Toronto, May 1995. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, 167-83).
Abstract On the basis of an electronic version of the Kildare Poems — compiled as part of the Corpus of Irish English — an analysis of lengthening environments was undertaken. The aim was to determine to what extent Middle English open-syllable lengthening could be assumed to have taken place in late medieval Irish English. The results suggests that the most important factor in Ireland was vowel height, the low vowel /a/ undergoing the lengthening but the mid and high vowel retaining a short articulation assuming that the orthographic interpretation of vowel values can be relied upon.
21) ‘Assessing the relative status of languages in medieval Ireland’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English linguistics (Berlin: Mouton, 1997, 181-205).
Abstract The concern of the present paper is to examine the status of Middle English and Anglo-Norman at the beginning of the settlement of Ireland from Britain in the late 12th century. Both of these languages were introduced after the first invasion from England in 1169. The assessment takes into account the ethnic composition of the newcomers, their internal relations and their relative social position in Ireland. The linguistic argumentation includes examining loanwords into Irish (the number is far greater from Anglo-Norman than from English in the early period) and the change in stress patterns in southern Irish, possibly under influence from Anglo-Norman. The conclusion drawn is that for the first two centuries at least English was not anything like as significant as Anglo-Norman and that its strongholds were the towns on the eastern coast.
20) ‘Arguments for creolisation in Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel (eds) Language history and linguistic modelling. A festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th birthday (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1997, 969-1038).
Abstract Although the external history of Irish English is quite different from that of acknowledged creoles like those in the Caribbean area the question is nonetheless valid to what extent Irish English, as a variety which arose throughout a long period of imperfect bilingualism, shows features which are prototypical of creoles. The paper contains surveys of previous treatments, direct or indirect, of the subject and presents all the possible arguments for and against, providing in the process alternative interpretations of such central features of Irish English as the set of aspectual distinctions. Much space in the article is devoted to assessing the putative creole status of features of Irish English. The conclusion arrived is that while this set of varieties does not — and most probably did not — meet the necessary criteria for classification as a creole (above all there is no grammatical restructuring in Irish English), it nonetheless represents a linguistic type which, among extant varieties of English, is closest to creoles in its structure.
19) ‘Lenition in Irish English’, in: Alison Henry, Martin Ball and Margaret MacAliskey (eds) 1996 Papers from the International Conference on Language in Ireland. Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, 13 (Belfast: University of Ulster, 1996, 173-93).
Abstract This article is an attempt to put the lenition which is characteristic of alveolar stops, intervocalically and word-finally before a pause in southern Irish English into a broader framework, i.e. that of the weakening of alveolars — involving tapping or glottalisation — in other varieties of English. It looks at lenition in Scouse which encompasses all voiceless stops (although recessive nowadays) and suggests that this was the original scope in Ireland. The question of a possible contact source is also addressed.
18) ‘The acquisition of Irish English phonology’, in: James Daw and Michèle Wolff (ed.) Language and Lives, Festschrift for Werner Enninger (New York: Lang, 1996, 171-87).
Abstract The acquisition of the specifically Irish pronunciation of English is of particular interest when considering oppositions in the area of obstruents. It can be seen that children in the first few years do not distinguish dentals from alveolars and show the allophony of alveolars with dentals such as mouth with a final fricative /t/ which suggests that they regard the alveolar point of articulation as primary, the dental one being secondary and acquired later.
17) ‘Identifying dialect speakers: The case of Irish English" in: Hannes Kniffka (ed.), Proceedings from the Third International Conference on Forensic Linguistics (Frankfurt: Lang, 1995, 217-37).
The concern of the present paper is to outline those segmental phonological features of Irish English which, alone or in combination, are unique to Irish English and which are of assistance when trying to identify a person as Irish. The examination shows that only the fricativisation of alveolar stops (/t, d/ to corresponding fricatives) is an absolute identification criterion. Other features are in combination good indicators such as dental realisation of interdental fricatives along with phonological processes like vowel epenthesis (film [filim]) and V-/r/ metathesis (modern with /dr[schwa]n/).
16) ‘An assessment of language contact in the development of Irish English" in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Language Contact and Linguistic Change (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995, 109-30).
Abstract This paper seeks to weigh up the twin factors of contact and conservatism in the genesis of Irish English by considering on the one hand the external history of the switch-over to English by the native Irish and on the other by contrasting the structures peculiar to Irish English with those in Irish and with early modern nonstandard forms of English. For this assessment the distinction between low-level transfer and systematic transfer is central. The author scrutinises the latter and introduces the notion of 'usurpation' whereby speakers in a situation of uncontrolled second language acquisition use afunctional elements in the target language (here: do as the expression of an habitual aspect) to reach equivalents to grammatical categories which they have in their own native language.
15) ‘The beginnings of Irish English" Folia Linguistica Historica (14), 1993, 213-38.
Abstract Irish English is unique among non-mainland varieties of English in reaching so far back in time. The earliest documents from the 14th century form the point of departure for the present investigation in which both the general Middle English characteristics and the specifically Irish traits of this early variety are examined. The essential question of the influence of the Irish language on medieval Irish English occupies a central position and parallels are drawn with the type of English which emerged later in the early modern period and with the attested forms of present-day (southern) Irish English.
14) ‘Suprasegmental transfer: on prosodic traces of Irish in Irish English’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Further insights into contrastive linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990, 219-29).
Abstract In the present paper various cases of possible interference from Irish in Irish English, which are to be found in the area of suprasegmental phonology, are examined. Three aspects of syntax which are influenced by sentence melody, namely the formation of the habitual aspect, topicalization structures and sentence coordination, and which in Irish English are deviant with regard to Standard English, are considered to be the result of transferral of prosodic features from Irish syntax. The distribution of syntactic stress is also considered with questions and answers in Irish and Irish English.
13) ‘R-coloured vowels in Irish English’, Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet, 1989, 44-58.
Abstract Due to the preservation of tautosyllabic /r/ in Irish English a large number of contrasts are found which are no longer present in Standard English (Southern British English). An analysis of the long vowel and short vowel phoneme inventories in Irish English is given, with particular emphasis on the realization of vowels before /r/. Additionally, processes such as suffixation and epenthesis are considered inasmuch as they affect vowel realization. Attention is also devoted to the possibility of Irish influence on this area of Irish English phonology.
12) ‘A lost Middle English dialect: the case of Forth and Bargy" in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Historical dialectology. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, 235-72). [See chapter 2 of Hickey 2007 Irish English. History and present-day forms. for an updated presentation of the material from this paper.]
Abstract Up until the beginning of the 19th century a variety of English survived which is a remnant of the language brought to Ireland in the late medieval period. This is known from the two baronies of county Wexford in the extreme south-east corner of Ireland where the dialect was spoken. The remains are contained in glossaries collected at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and in a small number of songs. The phonetics of this archaic form of English is quite unusual, going on the orthographic representation used by the collectors of dialect material. The present article is an attempt to arrive at a plausible conjecture for the sound system of the dialect by using comparative evidence (stemming mostly from Irish) and by examining internal developments in Irish English in general.
11) ‘Standard English, deviation and interference. A reply to Roger Lass’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 1988, 11-14.
Abstract In this reply to an article by Roger Lass (1985), itself a response to two articles by R. Hickey (1983a,b) the position of the interference hypothesis with regard to Irish English is defended. Lass’ criticism is seen to be partly founded on a misunderstanding of Hickey’s standpoint which does not claim to prove interference but merely to make it appear more likely to have taken place in the history of Irish English. The notion of Standard English is also discussed and defended as it is needed as a yardstick against which to measure the ‘deviance’ of Irish English.
10) ‘Phonotactically conditioned alternation: instances from Old High German and Irish English’, Linguistics (22), 1984, 673-86.
Abstract Part of the High German consonant shift involves the shift of /t/ under certain circumstances to a sound which was orthographically represented as 3. The circumstances under which it appears are closely examined and the views in the relevant literature on what sound value 3 had are recapitulated. A sound in Irish English which has an identical distribution to 3 and which also derives from /t/ is regarded as being the same as the result of the shift in pre-Old High German, this then being a voiceless apico-alveolar fricative in favour of which various phonological arguments are forwarded. The position of 3 in loan-words and the later development of it and /s/ in German are also considered.
9) ‘Length and frontness with low vowels in Irish English’, Studia Linguistica (39:2), 1986, 143-56.
Abstract The manifestations of low vowels in Irish English present some variation in terms of frontness and length, furthermore there appears to be a correlation between these two parameters such that the characterization of low vowels as either non-long and front or long and non-front would seem to hold not only for Irish English but for a series of other languages which are also considered. Exceptions (Hungarian and Dutch) are seen not to contradict this but to show the operation of coarticulation which results in different patterning. Additionally the interrelationships of the set of low vowels in Irish English with each other on a systematic level are examined.
8) ‘Kontinuität und Erneuerung im Vokalsystem des irischen Englischen’, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik (52), 1985, 324-40.
Abstract, English Title means 'Continuity and innovation in the vowel system of Irish English'. The history of the vowel system of southern Irish English is the topic of this article. The view, found for instance in Bliss (1972), that the vowel system is that of Elizabethan English is found to be too simplistic as it has been influenced by later superimposed, more standard varieties of English which have contributed to the values found in the supraregional standard of the south today.
Abstract, German Das Vokalsystem des Irischen Englischen weist eine Reihe von Unterschieden auf, wenn man es mit dem des Standard-Englischen vergleicht. Das Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, die Frage zu erörtern, ob diese Tatsache auf den Konservatismus (d.h. auf eine Kontinuität) oder auf den Transfer aus dem Irischen bzw. auf eigene Entwicklungen des Irischen Englischen (d.h. auf Innovation) zurückgeht. Die Argumente, die für eine Interferenzhypothese sprechen, werden durch einen Vergleich zwischen dem Vokalsystem des Irischen und dem des Irischen Englischen, dargestellt und diejenigen Argumente, die für eine Konservatismushypothese sprechen, werden durch einen Vergleich mit dem Vokalsystem des Frühneuenglischen veranschaulicht. Bei der Untersuchung einzelner Vokale werden diese beiden möglichen Quellen gleichermaßen berücksichtigt. Unterschiede zwischen Varietäten des heutigen Irischen Englischen werden auch erläutert.
7) ‘Possible phonological parallels between Irish and Irish English’, English World-Wide (7:1), 1986, 1-21.
Abstract The question as to whether the sound system of Irish exercised an influence on the development of Irish English in its phonological aspect is investigated here. Alongside the possibilities of interference the role which the conservative nature of English in Ireland plays has been considered and the two sources for the characteristics of present-day Irish English are weighed up one against the other. The investigation is divided into two broad categories, vowels and consonants with the additional examination of some phonological processes such as epenthesis, consonant weakening, etc. Conservative features of Irish English phonology such as the voiceless labio-velar continuant and post-vocalic /r/ are considered from the point of view of possible preservative interference from Irish.
6) ‘Syllable onsets in Irish English’, Word (35), 1984, 67-74.
Abstract Two respects in which Irish English differs from Standard English are investigated here. The first concerns the deletion or retention of /j/ before /u:/ when this is preceded by a further segment. The second concerns the systematic nature of the (phonetic) voiceless palatal fricative and the voiceless labio-velar continuant in Irish English. In both cases the phonetic facts are used to show the operation of regularities on a phonological level (particularly the position of glides in the phonemic system) and to demonstrate with these instances the complex relationship of phoneme affiliation to sound substance.
5) ‘Coronal segments in Irish English’, Journal of Linguistics (20), 1984, 233-51.
Abstract The main differences between Irish English and Standard English in the area of consonants lies with those segments which can be grouped together as being coronal. The peculiarities considered in the present article are the fricative realization of post-stress alveolar stops in a continuant environment, the dental stop realization of Standard English ambidental fricatives and the dentalization of alveolar stops before /r/. After providing a full phonetic description, a phonological classification of coronal segments in four main varieties of Irish English is given. In conclusion the difficulties of describing the distinctions resulting from the Irish English peculiarities of consonant realization within the framework of generative phonology are discussed.
4) ‘Towards a contrastive syntax of Irish and English’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Contrastive linguistics, prospects and problems. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984, 187-203).
Abstract In this article an outline is given of the more salient differences between Irish and English. Word order, in particular positioning of complements and the means for fronting topicalized elements in Irish, is treated to begin with. Ambiguity in Irish due for example to clause subordination procedures, and the equivalents of the passive in Irish along with Irish English correspondences to the perfective of Irish are also examined. Other elements dealt with are verb concatenation, prepositional usage, prepositional pronouns and polyfunctional forms in Irish. The conclusion is formed by a brief discussion of interference types.
3) ‘Syntactic ambiguity in Hiberno-English’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia (15), 1983, 39-45.
Abstract Due to transfer from Irish during the development of English in Ireland various constructions which already exist in Standard English have equivalents in Hiberno-English with different meanings. This gives rise to syntactic ambiguity, the nature of which is analysed. Attention is given, by comparison with Irish syntax, to the mechanisms of transfer from which the ambiguity arose and the strategies of contextualization which can be used to resolve it are mentioned.
2) ‘Remarks on pronominal usage in Hiberno-English’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia (15), 1983, 47-53.
Abstract In the course of its development Hiberno-English has come to possess a system of personal pronouns quite different from that of Standard English. The differences centre around the second person pronoun which, for reasons of probable interference from Irish, distinguishes between the singular and plural. This distinction is however not simply that which formerly obtained in English (you # ye) but consists of using additional phonetic possibilities in the inflectional system of English, the description and operation of these forming the core of the analysis.
1) ‘The phonology of English loan-words in Inis Meáin Irish’, Ériu (33), 1982, 137-56.
Abstract The systematic alterations in the structure of English loan-words in a practically homogeneous Irish-speaking linguistic community are considered. The Irish English realizations of the English phoneme inventory are discussed as the carriers of English loan-words into Irish. An examination is given of vowels and consonants with particular attention given to the influence of the Irish phoneme system on the form of loan-words, for example in the area of vowel substitution, palatalization or velarization of consonants (and possible lengthening) and the introduction of extraneous sounds, for example affricates. In conclusion, epenthesis, stress and phonotactics are considered briefly.
35) ‘Phonological change in English’, in: Merja Kytö and Päivi Pahta (eds) Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Abstract This chapter serves a dual purpose: firstly to examine the trajectories of sound change in the history of English and secondly to consider the proposals put forward by various scholars to account for this change. The chapter considers change on various levels of the sound system, for instance, changes in phonotactics (the loss of initial sequences like /fn-/ and /kn-/), changes in syllable quantity (the loss of predictable moraic quantity in stressed monosyllables), the demise of consonantal length contrasts (e.g. sellan /sellan/ to sell /sel/) and the loss of various segments in the history of English phonology (e.g. that of /x/ and its voiced counterpart). Change is not the only consideration: the constant elements of English phonology also form a major focus of the chapter: (i) the persistence of phonemic vowel length, (ii) the stability of short front vowels, (iii) the continued presence of interdental fricatives, to mention just three prominent examples. Other constants are, of course, the constants of change, e.g. the shifts in long vowels and the weaking of inflectional endings and various lenition processes with consonants. The concentration is on forms of English in England, but references is made to other forms and the rise of varieties across the anglophone world is also be considered, inasmuch as these throw light on the manner in which the phonology of English has developed.
34) ‘Retention and innovation in settler Englishes’, in: Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Devyani Sharma (eds) The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Abstract The transportation of English overseas in the colonial period, between approximately 1600 and 1900, from different parts of England, Scotland and Ireland led to the rise of diverse varieties of English depending on the source area from which most of the founder generation originated from as well as on the mixture of dialects at the overseas locations and the ecologies of these sites. This study is concerned with the extent to which features of English input to new overseas varieties were retained and what factors were instrumental in this process, e.g. whether the areas are relic or diapora locations. Further issues in this complex are considered, e.g. focussing, reanalysis of variation, internal dialect patterning and the refunctionalisation and reallocation of features. Innovation, as the reverse process of retention, is then considered, specifically the internal and external motivation for this. In addition, shared innovations across the anglophone world are looked at. Finally, the various models for accounting for the genesis of new varieties of English are examined.
33) ‘Mergers, losses and the spread of English’, in: Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge and Jeremy J. Smith (eds) Developments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Abstract The current chapter is intended to take a focussed and integrated look at a specific type of phonological development in overseas forms of English which have arisen in the course of the last four centuries. The development in question leads to mergers, either of vowels or of consonants which were distinguished in the varieties of English take to overseas locations during the colonial period. The mergers to be considered vary considerably in their occurrence across the anglophone world. Some are virtually universal, e.g. homophony in the TURN - TERM set. The lack of other mergers is now practically only found in the British Isles, e.g. distinctiveness in the MEAT - MEET set. Still other mergers are now confined to a specific phonotactic environment, e.g. homophony in the PEN - PIN set which is confined to a pre-nasal environment. Some mergers appear to lie below the level of consciousness for speakers, going on popular comments on emerging varieties in former English colonies (see the discussions in Hickey ed., 2010). This is true of the HOARSE - HORSE merger which has occurred virtually everywhere in overseas varieties of English and which has always led to a raising of the open vowel in the HORSE set.
32) ‘Vowels before /r/ in the history of English’, in: Daniel Schreier, Olga Timofeeva, Anne Gardner, Alpo Honkapoja, and Simone Pfenninger (eds) Contact, Variation and Change in the History of English. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
Abstract In the past few centuries vowels before historic /r/ have gone through many changes in different varieties of English, including non-rhotic forms which lost syllable-final /r/ in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. These changes can be grouped into two major types. The first is characteristed by the collapse of a front / back distinction for short mid vowels (the NURSE-TERM merger) which holds for all supraregional forms of English, bar those in Scotland where, in addition, the vowel in BIRD may retain a front, high quality. The loss of distinctiveness for these vowels is attributed to the rhotacisation of the entire syllable nucleus which is something which must have happened before the loss of /r/ which led to non-rhotic varieties. The second type of change involves the merger of two formerly distinct pre-rhotic vowels to one, as in the HORSE-HOARSE and the POOR-POUR mergers. There are further subtypes to the merger development, e.g. merger through diphthong smoothing as in the TOWER-TYRE merger. Finally, there are pre-rhotic mergers which involve more than two elements, e.g. the MARY-MERRY-MARRY which depend on the loss of both qualitative and quantitive distnictions.
31) ‘English as a contact language in Ireland and Scotland’, in: Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier (eds) English as a Contact Language. (Cambridge: University Press, 2013, 88-105).
Abstract Among the contact scenarios in the anglophone world there is a subgroup which has involved language shift to English during their recent history. The varieties of English which arose due to language shift form a typological class in the arena of present-day forms of the language. These varieties are characterised by non-standard syntactic features but not by morphological ones, unless the forms of English which acted as a target during the language shift themselves showed non-standard morphological features. Furthermore, the phonology of language shift varieties generally bears traits of the outset language in the shift process. In this respect language shift varieties are closer to present-day contact varieties in Asia and Africa, so-called ‘New Englishes’, and further removed from settler varieties in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The present study considers the linguistic nature of such shift varieties using data from varieties of English in Ireland and Scotland.
30) ‘Areal features of the anglophone world’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Areal Features of the Anglophone World. (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2012, 1-19).
Abstract Features of non-standard English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world, are the central concern of the volume to which this paper is the introduction. The probably reasons for the rise of areal features is of central interest here and the manifestation of language contact forms the main focus. This is of particular relevance when looking at regions in which English is present at several locations, e.g. the Caribbean or Africa. But areal concerns go beyond these individual considerations and examine the overall structure of varieties searching for explanations in the process. For instance, the common features found in New Englishes in South Asia and South-East Asia could have an areal explanation, due to the presence of background languages from large family groups but they could also be due to similarities in the acquisitional situation for speakers of these varieties. For settler varieties in former English colonies the reasons for areal features could lie in the input varieties taken to the locations in question in the early days of settlement, i.e. one could be dealing with founder effects. Another avenue to be explored is the possible existence of vernacular universals in varieties of English world-wide. Their presence at a given location would then not be due to contact and transfer but to the surfacing of universal tendencies.
Abstract The role of contact in the history of English, and that of other languages, has undergone a fundamental re-assessment in the last two decades or so. There have been two main reasons for this. The first concerns the re-appraisal of the Celtic influence on Old English, a topic which has a long pedigree, but only outside the mainstream of work on the history of English. The thorough investigations of Markku Filppula and his colleagues have led to new insights being registered by mainstream scholars and in some cases incorporated into historical surveys of English. In addition to work on Celtic, renewed consideration of the contact between Old Norse and Old English has rekindled interest in the nature of contact throughout the history of English. Furthermore, a more critical attitude to the anglocentric stance of Anglo-Saxonism, which arose in the eighteenth century, has led in some, though not all cases, to a more inclusive view of the history of English.
28) ‘Early English and the Celtic hypothesis’, in: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 497-507).
Abstract
The current chapter considers Celtic influence on early Old English, an issue debated in detail recently which helps to throw light on general contact arguments in language change. The scholarly opinion that Brythonic, the language spoken in England by the Celtic population at the time of the Germanic invasions, had a significant effect on the development of English is known as the Celtic hypothesis . The standard wisdom on contact and transfer has traditionally been that the language with more status influences that with less, that is, borrowing is from the superstrate into the substrate, as is attested by Latin and French borrowings into English. This is, however, a simplistic view of possible influence in a contact scenario. Vocabulary, as an open class with a high degree of awareness by speakers, is the primary source of borrowing from the superstrate. Histories of English have not in general concerned themselves with features of early English with a possible Celtic source. Supporters of the Celtic hypothesis criticize the view taken in many textbooks that because there are only a few loanwords from Celtic there was no other influence. However, if contact persists over a longer period and forms the language learning environment for many generations, then the substrate can have a gradual and imperceptible influence on the superstrate, often leading to grammatical change. This scenario may well have been the source of syntactic features in English, which the latter has in common with Celtic. It is especially likely if a section of the population shifted language and transferred features from their outset language in the process.
27) ‘Internally and externally motivated language change’, in: Juan Manuel Hernández-Compoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds) The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 401-421).
Abstract
This chapter is exploratory in nature and considers the issue of motivation for language change, specifically the question whether a clear distinction can be drawn between internally and externally motivated language change. The question is essentially one which considers the ‘behaviour of speakers’ versus the ‘properties of languages&rquo; and it is obvious that the simple labels ‘internally-motivated’ and ‘externally-motivated’ language change do not do justice to the complex and intricate relationship between how speakers act linguistically in their community and the postulated abstract level of structure which is taken to provide the basis for speakers’ behaviour. It is clear then that linguistic reality is too complex to be captured entirely by a simple binary division of change types into ‘internal’ and ‘external’. Indeed, these two labels should not be understood as forming a mutually exclusive dichotomy but rather as referring to two possible sources which can be identified in language change, the description of whose differential interaction is an essential part of accounting for this change.
26) ‘Standard English and standards of English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Standards of English. Codified Varieties Around the World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 1-33).
Abstract English is nowadays a pluricentric language which shows many national and supraregional varieties around the world. The various standards of English which are found in English-speaking countries can be subdivided into two basic forms: (i) overtly codified varieties which are set down in print and which have support from major publishing houses in the relevant countries, above all in Great Britain and the United States and (ii) covertly codified varieties which also serve the function as a standard but which have not been explicitly formulated. Speakers of the latter kind, e.g. in Scotland or Ireland (north and south), know intuitively what features are part of the ‘standard’, i.e. which are free from stigma and accepted in public usage. This latter type of situation would seem to apply to the majority of anglophone countries, at least in that the national standard is not specified explicitly for pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The non-stigmatised variety of a country is not generally bound to a certain region, though historically it may have arisen from the non-vernacular speech of a region or a city.
Supraregionalisation is an historical process whereby varieties of a language lose specifically local features and becomes less regionally bound. The upper limits of supraregionalisation depend on a number of external factors, such as the boundary of the state in which the set of varieties is spoken. Furthermore, if the state historically derives from a colony of another state, then there may be an (unconscious) wish within that state to maintain some linguistic distinctiveness vis à vis the varieties of the former colonising country. As a type of language change supraregionalisation is subject to the phases of actuation, propagation and termination. The actuation is probably triggered by a consciousness of the provinciality of one’s own language and the presence of more mainstream varieties, be these extra-national or not. In the case of Irish English we can see that in the course of the 19th century a number of features are filtered out so that reports on Irish English at the beginning of the twentieth century make no allusion to them. This chapter is concerned with just what type of features are removed during the process of supraregionalisation and by comparison with other varieties attempts to offer reasons for the disappearence of certain features and the retention of others.
24) ‘Rural and urban Ireland: A question of language?’, in: Irene Gilsenan Nordin (ed.) Urban and Rural Landscapes in Modern Ireland: Language, Literature and Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 17-38).
Abstract This paper opens with a consideration of the population distribution in present-day Ireland, emphasising the large concentrations in the two metropolitan areas of Belfast and Dublin. It then reviews the urban-rural split in Irish literature of the past two centuries and considers the use of language with writers from both the city and the countryside. The use of the ‘brogue’, a stereotype rural Irish accent, for the portrayal of prototypically Irish characters is examined as are the ambivalent attitudes of Irish writers to this accent and its speakers. The paper also looks at the deliberate exploitation and manipulation of Irish rural accents by later writers such as Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge as well as at twentieth century representations of urban Irish English, e.g. with Sean O’Casey.
23) ‘Linguistic evaluation of earlier texts’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed). Varieties in Writing. The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, 1-14).
Abstract This introduction to the volume on records of non-standard varieties of English discusses a number of key issues in this complex. It distinguishes between methodological issues – how one goes about evaluating ‘bad data’ texts, for instance – and documentary issues – clarifying and classifying just what is available for analysis.
22) ‘Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed). Eighteenth-century English. Ideology and Change. (Cambridge: University Press, 2010, 1-20).
This chapter provides an overall introduction to the topic of the volume on eighteenth-century English which it opens. Essential linguistic themes of this century are presented, such as grammar writing and prescriptivism and their contribution to the rise of standard English. Further issues are also discussed such as the nature of linguistic politeness and the networks of authors whose works represent the main textual record of this period.
21) ‘Telling people how to speak. Rhetorical grammars and pronouncing dictionaries’, in: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff (eds) Proceedings of the Third Late Modern English Conference. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009, 89-116).
When tracing the origins of linguistic prescriptivism in Britain and Ireland there appears to be evidence for a sea-change from the early to the mid and late 18th century. Certainly authors like Swift, and others of the Augustan age, were concerned with the immutability of the English language, a not unselfish but unrealistic goal which would have assured that their works were accessible to future generations. By the time that Swift’s godson Thomas Sheridan was writing in the mid 18th century the concerns appear to have changed and the focus was on correctness in language and the criticism of those who did not show this is very obvious. The work of Sheridan and of his near contemporary John Walker are examined in this article and their influence on notions of prescriptivism are scrutinised.
20) ‘Exceptions to sound change and external motivation’, in: Marina Dossena, Richard Dury and Maurizio Gotti (eds). Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21-25 August 2006. Volume III: Geo-historical Variation. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, 188-96).
Sound changes typically come as sets of changes, especially with vowel, where a group of sounds shift together. Such changes can be expressed as a general movement, such as vowel raising by a level, vowel lowering, diphthongisation, fronting or whatever. Sometimes with such changes the entire set of potential input elements is not affected, i.e. there is some exception to the change. Normally, such exceptions are explained via internal considerations, such as the distribution of elements in vowel space or the avoidance of homophony. There may well be recalcitrant cases where an internal explanation is unconvincing. With changes which lie far in the past, it is not possible to reconstruct the sociolinguistics of a language / variety at the time of the change and hence it is not possible to postulate a convincing external motivation for exceptions to sound changes. With the help of changes in present-day English, an attempt is made to show how exceptions affecting groups of sounds can arise, either from the beginning of a change or during its course. Furthermore, a combination of internal and external factors may be responsible for the precise manifestation of a change.
19) ‘Productive lexical processes in present-day English’, in: Mair, Christian, Reinhard Heuberger and Josef Wallmannsberger (eds) Corpora and the History of English. A Festschrift for Manfred Markus. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006, 153-68).
This paper looks at types of changes in the vocabulary of present-day English with the specific intention of isolating and describing the productive processes active within the lexicon. Attention is paid to a variety of factors, such as metaphorical extension, and the question are considered whether new processes of word-formation are in line with the existing typological profile of English or whether new avenues are opening up in this area. The paper also examines structural aspects of productivity and seek to uncover semantic regularities which enable speakers to readily interpret new formations correctly.
18) ‘Standard wisdoms and historical dialectology: the discrete use of historical regional corpora’, in: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds) Methods and data in English historical dialectology. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004, 199-216).
Just as in mainstream historical dialectology, in the diachronic study of regional varieties of English there are many cherished ideas about how these varieties arose and what they were like at earlier historical stages. Especially with regional forms of English from the British Isles, these questions are by no means trivial as they have a clear bearing on the transportation of English overseas and what we regard as the possible continuation of dialect features from input varieties to those locations where English was transported. In recent years a number of historical regional corpora have become available and are of assistance in determining what the shape and contours of earlier forms of regional varieties were like. In the present instance, the author's A Corpus of Irish English (John Benjamins 2003) is investigated with a view to demonstrating what historical evidence is contained in the texts it consists of. In particular questions of dialect syntax (aspectual structures) and morphology (pronominal forms for the second person) are examined and some exemplary studies are presented briefly.
17) ‘South-East Asian Englishes’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 559-85).
The English language in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines is the object of investigation in this chapter. The external histories of these countries are considered and the position of English in recent history and its promotion or relative neglect is examined with a view to accounting for the levels of competence attained by the various groups in these countries. The background languages, the type of English speakers are exposed to and various interactions are discussed in some detail.
Also in same volume by present author: (i)
16) ‘South Asian Englishes’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 536-58).
The development of the English language in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka is examined in this chapter. The past two centuries are reviewed historically and the external situation of the language is sketched. The linguistic features which can be ascertained on a general level for English in this part of Asia are described and discussed. The question of contact between English and various background languages is given special attention.
15) ‘Englishes in Asia and Africa: origin and structure’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 503-35).
The development of forms of English which do not stem from native-speaker settlers of the colonial period is the subject of this chapter. In those countries where a high degree of competence has been reached this is usually due to the promotion of English in education. The linguistic details of typical New Englishes from Asia are examined here and characteristics deriving from the language acquisition situation on the one hand and from the effect of background languages on the other are discussed.
14) ‘English dialect input to the Caribbean’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 326-59).
Abstract The historical situation of the Caribbean is examined here, especially in the light of recent views that dialect input in the early 17th century played a decisive role in the formation of varieties of English there, creolisation setting in somewhat later with the establishment of plantations. The interrelations within the Caribbean due to outmigration from key islands such as Barbados and Montserrat are considered and a variety of features are examined which have parallels in British (and Irish) regional dialects. The position of African American Vernacular English is also the subject of attention.
13) ‘Dialects of English and their transportation’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 33-58).
Abstract The aim of this chapter is to present a detailed discussion of the structure of non-standard form of English English during the period between the early 16th century and the early 19th century and an overview of the regional patterns of emigration from England at the same period. The chapter deals with an array of phonological features and with grammatical features such as a-prefixing, for to-infinitives and suffixal s in the present tense and with habitual aspect, all of which are contentious issues in extraterritorial varieties.
12) ‘Introduction to Legacies of colonial English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 1-30).
Abstract This chapter outlines the standpoint adopted for the entire book, discusses a number of external settings for extraterritorial varieties of English and attempts to interpret a range of phenomena from the varieties of English in the light of dialect input without, however, forcing an interpretation on recalcitrant data. There is also a comprehensive checklist of features which are non-standard and hence in need of an explanation as (i) the result of dialect input, (ii) contact-induced or (iii) independent developments, possibly of a universal nature deriving from the sociolinguistic situation of the varieties which exhibit them.
11) ‘Tracking lexical change in present-day English’, in Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Tony McEnery (eds.) Corpus Linguistics by the Lune. A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003, 93-105.
Abstract For several centuries English has been well-known for frequent cases of conversion (word-class change without any formal alteration). In recent decades a further development can be observed which for the want of a better word I term univerbation. By this is meant that structures consisting of several words are reduced to one, as when a verbal phrase is compacted to a single word, e.g. we spent the night in Vienna -> we overnighted in Vienna. My contention is that such cases illustrate a process which is part of a long-term typological shift in English. The latter is what has been observed in the shift from a morphologically complex to an inflectionally simplified language and is conventionally referred to as a move from synthetic to analytic. The current process can be viewed as a later stage in an analytic language where lexical compaction is in evidence and can thus be interpreted as part of a typological cycle. The paper looks at several cases illustrating the matters just alluded to and comment on the theoretical ramifications for the structure of English.
10) ‘How and why supraregional varieties arise’, in Marina Dossena and Charles Jones (eds) Insights into Late Modern English (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003, 351-73).
Abstract Supraregionalisation is an historical process whereby varieties of a language lose specifically local features and becomes less regionally bound. The upper limits of supraregionalisation depend on a number of external factors, such as the boundary of the state in which the set of varieties is spoken. Furthermore, if the state historically derives from a colony of another state, then there may be an (unconscious) wish within that state to maintain some linguistic distinctiveness vis à vis the varieties of the former colonising country. Put in concrete terms, one can see that the supraregional form of English in the Republic of Ireland (which is derived from mainstream Dublin English) is distinctive from the standard of southern British English. This article is concerned with just what type of features are removed during the process of supraregionalisation and by comparison with other varieties attempts to offer reasons for the disappearence of certain features and the retention of others. It also looks at changes and developments within supraregional varieties.
9) ‘Rectifying a standard deficiency. Pronominal distinctions in varieties of English’, in Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds), Diachronic perspectives on address term systems, Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series, Vol. 107 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003, 345-74).
Abstract This paper is concerned with those varieties of English which in contradistinction to the standard, maintain or have developed a diadic system with pronouns of the second person to express the distinction between singular and plural formally. Although no extraterritorial variety has developed a T/V system along a formal/informal axis, the distinction between singular and plural is seen as characteristic of vernacular varieties of English and its appearance is connected with style-shifting downwards. In addition to questions of pragmatics and register the formal expression of the second person plural is also examined.
8) ‘How do dialects get the features they have? On the process of new dialect formation’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Motives for language change. (Cambridge: University Press, 2002, 213-39).
Abstract In the history of extraterritorial forms of English a large range of sociolinguistic scenarios arose which had a significant bearing on the manner in which English developed at these new locations. One of these settings is looked at in detail here, namely that which applied to New Zealand in the 19th century where a mixture of different dialects led to a new form of English, different from other varieties, crystalising within a few generations. This article looks at the features attested in New Zealand English and considers whether these can be traced back to the nature of the English input and the sociolinguistic setting which held during the formative period for this location.
7) ‘Ebb and flow. A cautionary tale of language change’, in: Teresa Fanego, Belén Mendez-Naya and Elena Seoane (eds) Sounds, words, texts, change. Selected papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (11 ICEHL). (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002, 105-28).
Abstract The reconstruction of languages and varieties often relies on evidence from so-called remnant communities in which it is assumed that the most original form is retained. The present article casts doubt on this assumption by examining a series of cases where a shift has occurred away from an earlier value and back again, e.g. from /a/ to /æ/ to /ɛ/ and back to /a/ again in the history of English. The reason for this ebb and flow is the dissociation practised by younger generations vis à vis older ones and/or by one section of a speech community with regard to another. The natural cycle of the generations can mean that a variant favoured by one will be avoided by another, hence the to and fro observable with a number of key features in the history of English and its varieties.
6) ‘On syncope in Old English’, in: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds) Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries. In honour of Jacek Fisiak on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1986, 359-66).
Abstract Syncope in Old English is seen to be a rule which is determined by syllable structure but furthermore to be governed by a set of restricting conditions which refer to the word-class status of the forms which may act as input to the syncope rule, and also to the inflectional or derivational nature of the suffixes which are added to syncope-prone base forms. The examination here refers also to the precise phonological structure of the forms which undergo syncope.
5) ‘The realization of dental obstruents adjacent to /r/ in the history of English’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 1987, 167-72.
Abstract Considerable fluctuation among ambi-dental fricatives and alveolar stops exists in the environment of /r/ from Middle English down to the present-day. The traditional distribution of fricatives and stops where the latter are found after /r/ and the former before /r/ is regarded as incorrect as the forms establishing the first half of the distribution represent insufficient evidence for this position. The basic shift is shown to be that of a fricative to a stop without a change in place of articulation. The dental stop arising from this shift is later lenited in some instances. Present-day dialectal evidence is used to support the view that the plosive /d/ which resulted from the ambi-dental fricative before /r/ was a dental stop.
4) ‘Remarks on syllable quantity in later Old English and early Middle English’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 1986, 1-7.
Abstract The various types of lengthening and shortening of vowels in late Old English/early Middle English can be seen as an embryonic development in the English of that period towards the predictability of syllable quantity. The processes of gemination and stop epenthesis are interpreted in accordance with this view. Essential to predictable quantity is consonant gemination; it is shown here that its demise in Middle English is due to its failure to functionalize due to two further quantity changes, which rendered consonant quantity difference superfluous, viz. open syllable lengthening and lengthening before sonorant and stop clusters.
3) ‘Remarks on assimilation in Old English’, Folia Linguistica Historica (5), 1984, 279-303.
Abstract The various forms of assimilation (of place and of manner) attested in Old English can be seen to be governed by definable phonological factors, mainly by the principle of increasing or decreasing resonance for syllable initial or final clusters and by phonotactic restrictions on segment sequences. Assimilation (under which dissimilation is also subsumed) can be shown to involve the three features ‘voice’, ‘continuant’ and ‘sonorant’, any number of which may be seen to have operated in a given attested assimilation. Syncope is also treated on the basis of the same processes which have been determined for assimilation.
2) ‘Velar segments in Old English and Old Irish’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Proceedings of the 6th. international conference on historical linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985, 267-79).
Abstract A section of the phoneme inventory of Old English and Old Irish is examined and the factors which determine the arrangement and manifestation of this section such as allophonic leeway and distribution on the systematic level of segments outside the velar area are illucidated. Phonemic overlapping and the morphological role of palatalization in Old Irish are seen to contribute essentially to many of the differences between the two languages being dealt with, as are the role of phonetic lenition and the operation of restrictions in the phonotactics in both languages which in fact account for some similarities.
1) ‘A valency framework for the Old English verb’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Historical Syntax (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984, 199-216).
Abstract Using the model of dependency grammar developed in Engel/Schumacher (1978) and Hickey (1980) the verb system of Old English is described in terms of the valencies (arguments and adjuncts) which various verbs may take. It is shown that the nine valency types are suitable both for describing the actual arguments found with verbs and for accounting for the incompatability of certain argument types with each other. Subdivisions of the types are suggested to account for differentiations among kinds of argument and the question of "sentence-like" complementation and infinitive complements are treated in some detail.
29) ‘Irish’, in: Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire. Special issue The Languages of the 27, edited by Wim Vandenbussche and Piet van Sterkenburg.
Abstract The present chapter offers an overview of the history and present-day forms of the Irish language. It begins by tracing the development of the language and then proceeds to a summary of features on the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. In addition there is information on the role of the Irish language in Irish society, e.g. its official status, its role in education and in the media. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the outlook for Irish in the 21st century.
28) ‘Gender in Modern Irish. The survival of a grammatical subsystem’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Researching the Languages of Ireland. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011, 159-180.
Abstract The system of grammatical gender in present-day Irish is the topic of this paper. The manner in which it is manifested and the degree of phonological predictability for grammatical gender and central questions. The demise of predictability because of the loss of phonetic substance at the end of words is considered. Reference tracking as the main motivation for gender in Irish is examined in some details and is seen as the factor which will be responsible for the survival of grammatical gender should this be the case.
27) ‘Language change’, in: Mirjam Fried (ed.) Variation and Change: Pragmatic Perspectives. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, 171-202).
Abstract In this overview the author considers previous research on language change and the various issues which have arisen and been discussed over the past few decades. The article considers the methodologies applied to the field from the comparative method and internal reconstruction to the text corpus and sociolinguistic/ variationist approaches of recent years. Further sections of the article deal with issues such as pathways of change, e.g. grammaticalisation, and with explanatory models of language change, such as speaker-induced language change, contact accounts and the typological perspective. The debate between functionalism and formalism is also given consideration.
26) ‘Contact and language shift’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Handbook of Language Contact. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 151-169).
Abstract The specific contact scenario of language shift is the topic of this chapter. Shift-induced changes are scrutinised and above all the manner in which transfer from source to target language is assumed to have taken place is discussed. There are many issues surrounding language shift which are highlighted, e.g. the manner in which possible transfer strucutres are reached by individuals and then spread through the community of shifting speakers to which they belong.
25) ‘Language Contact: Reassessment and reconsideration’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Handbook of Language Contact. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 1-28).
Abstract This chapter presents an overview of the essential themes in current research into language contact. It distinguishes various sub-topics within the field and discusses varying views by different authors. A discussion of terminological matters is also found and the direction of present-day research into language contact is examined closely.
24) ‘Language Use and Attitudes in Ireland. A preliminary evaluation of survey results’, Sochtheangeolaíocht na Gaeilge (ed. Brian Ó Catháin), Léachtaí Cholm Cille 39: 62-89.
Abstract Based on a total of more than 400 returned questionnaires from the first phase of a large-scale survey into language attitudes and language use in both the north and the south of Ireland, this overview outlines the main aims of the survey and discusses and analyses the preliminary results. These show clearly that there is broad, but non-committal support for the Irish language in Ireland and that this has influenced attitudes to the English language which is now the native language of virtually the entire population of those born in Ireland.
23) ‘Syntax and prosody in language contact and shift’, in: Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) The Celtic Languages in Contact. Papers from the Workshop within the Framework of the XIII International Congress of Celtic Studies, Bonn, 26-27 July 2007. Potsdam: University Press, 2008, 235-44.
Abstract It is true that scholars concentrate on a certain linguistic level in order to reach the greatest depth in their research. But this general stance should not lead to a complete neglect of other levels. When considering a multi-level phenomenon such as language contact and shift, concentration on a single linguistic level can have the unintended and unfortunate consequence of missing linguistically significant generalisations. This is especially true of the main division of linguistic research into a phonological and a grammatical camp, where syntacticians miss phonological generalisations and phonologists syntactic ones. In the present paper the interrelationship of syntax and prosody is investigated with a view to explaining how and why certain transfer structures from Irish became established in Irish English. In this context, the consideration of prosody can be helpful is explaining the precise form of transfer structures in the target variety, here vernacular Irish English. The data for the investigation considers well-known features of this variety, such as unbound reflexives, non-standard comparatives and tag questions. Furthermore, the paper points out that taking prosodic patterns into account can help in extrapolating from individual transfer to the community-wide establishment of transfer structures. In sum, prosody is an essential element in any holistic account of language contact and shift.
22) ‘Mergers, near-mergers and phonological interpretation’, in: Christian J. Kay, Carole Hough and Irené Wotherspoon (eds) New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics , (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004, 125-137).
Abstract The topic of the current article is whether speakers can make fine phonetic distinctions in their speech which they are not able to perceive. A further question which follows on an affirmation of the first is whether such distinctions can be passed on to following generations. The article looks at a couple of well-known cases, such as long front vowels in Early Modern English, and weighs up the arguments in favour of assuming near mergers or of positing other explanations such as the existence of more than one variety in a single locality (here: London) with and without the distinction. It also considers the nature of minute phonetic realisations and speakers awareness of these.
21) ‘Language change’, in: Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert (eds) Handbook of pragmatics. 2001 installment. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003, 1-35).
Abstract In this overview the author considers previous research on language change and the various issues which have arisen and been discussed over the past few decades. The article considers the methodologies applied to the field from the comparative method and internal reconstruction to the text corpus and sociolinguistic/variationist approaches of recent years. Further sections of the article deal with issues such as pathways of change, e.g. grammaticalisation, and with explanatory models of language change, such as speaker-induced language change, contact accounts and the typological perspective. The debate between functionalism and formalism is also given consideration.
20) ‘The German address system. Binary and scalar at once’, in Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds) Diachronic perspectives on address term systems, Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series, Vol. 107 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003, 401-25).
The purpose of the present paper is to consider the address system of German from the point of view of its components, structure and its use in contemporary Germany. In addition the apparent rigidity of the system is dealt with to throw light on the way in which speakers cope with the tension which arises from a binary system which has to reflect complex social relationships linguistically. In essence this study shows that while pronominally German has a reciprocal binary system of T and V forms (Du [T] 'you-SG' is the pronoun of familiar address and Sie [V] 'you-3-P-PL' that of formal address), this simple division does not do justice to the expression of nuances with which Germans perform their social exchanges. In addition to the binary pronominal distinction there are many discourse strategies which Germans employ to increase the formality or informality of an exchange. These strategies are given particular attention in this article.
19) ‘Internal and external forces again: Word order change in Old English and Old Irish’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Collecting views on language change. (Special issue of Language Sciences, 2002, 24:1, 261-83).
Abstract The relative weight which is accorded to internal and external factors in language change is an ongoing debate. In this paper the claims made by Lass in several papers in which he downplays the role of contact as a source of new features are critically examined and the double position that core structural features of a language always have priority and that inherited features remain unaltered is contested with evidence produced to show that this is not necessarily always the case.
18) ‘Language change in early Britain: The convergence account’, in: Restle, David and Dietmar Zaefferer (eds) Sounds and systems. Studies in structure and change. A Festschrift for Theo Vennemann. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 2002, 185-203).
In recent years, new proposals have been put forward by Theo Vennemann for the source of many unexpected features in the early stages of both Irish and English. His accounts rest on contact between pre-historical forms of both these languages with non-Indo-European peoples already in the north-west of Europe before the Celtic and later the Germanic settlers arrived there. The contact view goes a long way to accounting for the otherness of Celtic and Germanic vis à vis the remaining Indo-European subgroups. However, for many of the phenomena examined by Vennemann and others, there are equally cogent endogenous models for their development. This paper attempts to present the case for both internal and external forces in the genesis of remarkable features of Celtic and English from within a convergence framework.
17) ‘Reanalysis and typological change’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Motives for language change. (Cambridge: University Press, 2003 258-78).
Abstract In the course of their development the Celtic languages have experienced considerable phonetic reduction through lenition of segments in weak positions. Over a long period of time this led to the demise of inherited Indo-European inflections and in their places a system of initial mutations arose which is used to indicate the grammatical categories formerly covered by the inflections. This paper looks at this system shift and interprets it as a reanalyis of the phonetic elements, which resulted from the lenition, as grammatically significant. Another issue discussed here is the number of distinctions required by a system of mutation in order to function fully as a grammatically central part of a language.
16) ‘Language terms and categories. The development of linguistic tradition in Irish’, in: Hannes Kniffka (ed.), Indigenous grammar across cultures (Frankfurt: Lang, 2001: 543-57).
Abstract Linguistic tradition reaches back in the history of Irish practically to the beginning of attestation. Pronouncements on language were in the early days mostly concerned with regulating its use in poetry. However, this resulted in the invention of terms and the division of the language into categories which have been remarkably tenacious throughout the subsequent development of Irish. With the establishment of linguistics as an objective discipline and its application to Irish in the nineteenth century further terminology and notation was introduced which has survived and been accepted widely and uncritically by later generations of linguists. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the influence of previous language work on the development of linguistic tradition in Irish and on the methodological and theoretical perspectives adopted by present-day scholars.
15) ‘Direction and location in Modern Irish’, in: Christine Dalton-Puffer and Nikolaus Ritt (eds) Words: Structure, meaning, function. A festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 2000, 125-40).
Abstract Modern Irish has a fairly transparent system of word-formational morphemes which can be used to express direction and location of various types, mainly linked to the cardinal points of the compass. Starting from actual expressions of direction and location, an attempt is made to uncover the systematic morphological structure which lies behind these words and to demonstrate the high degree of regularity which the language still shows in this area.
14) ‘The phonology of gender in Modern German’, in: Matti Rissanen and Barbara Unterbeck (eds) Gender. Cross-linguistic studies. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1999, 621-63).
Abstract The present paper is an attempt to uncover the regularities of gender assignment in German. After introductory remarks in which the origin and manifestation of gender in various Indo-European languages are remarked on, the specific nature of German gender is discussed particularly with respect to putative gender predictability. The distinction between stem and stem extension is drawn and a detailed characterization of both in German is offered. In a following section the area of loan-words is examined from the point of view of gender and the phonological criteria used in assigning gender to loan-words are enumerated with a closing discussion of seemingly arbitrary gender in this area of the German lexicon.
13) ‘Sound change and typological shift: Initial mutation in Celtic’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Linguistic typology and reconstruction (Berlin: Mouton, 1995, 133-82).
Abstract In the course of the development of Celtic a system of phonetic sandhi phenomena were functionalized and have come to be central to the morphology of all the present-day Celtic languages. These phenomena are seen here in direct relation to the loss of inherited inflectional endings and as an attempt to compensate for the attrition of the morphology. The result has been a typological realignment which has been maintained despite later changes which shifted the system somewhat. By examining a number of parallel cases the position of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, is put into perspective.
12) ‘Early contact and parallels between English and Celtic’, Vienna English Working Papers (4:2), 1995, 87-119.
Abstract The central hypothesis of this paper is that there may well have been a low-level influence from British Celtic on Old English whereby the phonetic makeup of the former with its lenition of consonants in weak environments and reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables may well have infected the pronunciation of Old English. At the very least this may have accelerated any tendency to phonetic opacity and attrition in unstressed syllables which may have been present in the existing varieties of the language leading ultimately to changes in morphology which are perceived as a shift in language type when viewed over a long period.
11) ‘Historical developments and synchronic states. Cases from Irish phonology’, Folia Linguistica Historica (15,2), 1994, 47-69.
Abstract This article is concerned with a number of developments in the history of Irish which have led to the unpredictable phonological behaviour of certain segments, such as sonorants which can cause a type of assimilation which is different from the phonetic value they possess, e.g. non-palatal sonorants can trigger palatal assimilation. The various attempts to account for this type of behaviour are examined here and an interpretation which sees these segments as lexically marked for assimilation is preferred over an unduly abstract view which posits underlying segments no longer present in the language.
10) ‘Sie hat ihn versucht zu erreichen. On interlocking in present-day German syntax" in: Wolfgang Lörscher and Rainer Schulze (eds) Perspectives on language in performance. [Festschrift for Werner Hüllen on his 60th birthday] (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1987, 271-81).
Abstract One of the major changes in the syntax of present-day German is the removal of direct objects from their place with the verbs that govern them to within the sentence brace of the verb which forms the main clause of a sentence (see sentence in title). Here the various manifestations of this phenomenon are critically examined with a view to putting forward an explanation for the widespread occurrence of such formally deviant structures.
9) ‘The status of diphthongs in Irish and Russian’, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik (39), 1985, 97-105.
Abstract The status of diphthongs in languages with a palatal # non-palatal contrast among consonants is a debatable point as the occurrence of these frequently correlates with a given value for the feature [palatal] for the vowel-flanking consonants. By examining phonetic diphthongs in Irish and Russian, which have in common that in each language series of palatal and non-palatal consonants exist, an attempt is made to develop rules which would predict the occurrence of these surface diphthongs from their consonantal environment as opposed to specifying them lexically. Various possibilities for analysing the elements of diphthongs phonemically are critically examined.
8) ‘The interrelationship of epenthesis and syncope, evidence from Irish and Dutch’, Lingua (65), 1985, 229-49.
Abstract Dutch and Irish can be shown to resemble each other in having epenthesis and to differ in that the former does not have syncope. An examination of the trigerring conditions for epenthesis shows that it is governed by a sonority scale of consonantal segments and that Dutch has epenthesis over the whole of this scale while Irish does not. Restricted epenthesis and syncope are shown to go hand in hand and the sonority scale which triggers the former is also responsible for the latter which appears on resyllabification of base forms when suffixes are added to them.
7) ‘Reduction of allomorphy and the plural in Irish’, Ériu (36), 1985, 143-62.
Abstract Native and loan-words in present-day Irish have a complicated system of plural formation. Apart from remnants of earlier declensional types which are found with the former and loan plurals from English with the latter there are two basic types of productive formation, palatalization (almost exclusively with native words) and /i:/-suffixation (with both native and loan-words). The second type shows a plethora of realizations. Most of these are accounted for by the operation of general phonological processes (e.g. stop epenthesis after laterals and nasals) and factors such as syllable structure. Through a consideration of all regular and quasi-productive factors an attempt is made to arrive at a radically simplified specification of the morphological component of plural suffixation.
6) ‘Issues in the vowel phoneme inventory of Western Irish’, Éigse (31), 1986, 214-26.
Abstract The vowels of the various dialects of Irish, including that of Cois Fhairrge examined here, are related to each other by a series of morphophonemic processes such as the lengthening of short vowels before certain word-final sonorants, and final palatalization or velarization; these are used to establish relationships between long and short and back and front vowels. The effect of additional factors such as r-lowering and nasal raising is considered and an attempt is made to predict alternations between back and front vowels given an outset position. In conclusion an analysis of the four surface diphthongs is offered whereby they can all be shown to be derived synchronically from a single underlying form.
5) ‘Syllable structure and sonority hierarchies in Irish’, Papers for the 5th. International Phonology Meeting, 1984, 123-8.
Abstract To show the validity of the notion of the syllable in the phonology of Modern Irish two phenomena are examined from the standpoint of syllable phonology. These are syncope and epenthesis, both of which can be shown to be governed by considerations of syllable structure, for example with syncope one sees that it takes place when the unstressed final vowel of a non-inflected form becomes medial on suffixation this causing resyllabification. Epenthesis is seen to be determined in its scope by the sonority scale as it does not affect all possible final clusters in Irish but only those which form a descending group on the scale down to a specified position beyond which epenthesis does not take place.
4) ‘Segmental phonology and word formation: Agency and abstraction in the history of Irish" in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Historical semantics and word formation. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1985, 199-219).
Abstract Two types of derivation, agency and abstraction, are used to illustrate peculiarities of segmental phonology in the history of Irish word-formation. These involve truncation and syncope on suffixation which have to be distinguished. Additionally there are a variety of conditions on the phonological shape of stems which affect the nature of the suffix used. Considerable attention is devoted to predicting palatalization of stems on suffixation and to the ordering of processes in derivations of which various competing ones are tested for correctness of output.
3) ‘Salient features of Irish syntax’, Lingua Posnaniensia, 1985, 15-25.
Abstract A sketch of the chief characteristics of Irish syntax is offered. Features of word order such as topicalization procedures and object positioning are dealt with first. The strong tendency towards nominalization in Irish, which is seen in the apparent shift in lexical class from verb to noun in a variety of constructions, is outlined as are the manifold possibilities of the synthetic prepositional pronouns in expressing semantic relations; here particular attention is paid to the figurative use of locative prepositions.
2) ‘A promise is a promise: on speech acts of commitment in English’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia (28), 1986, 69-80.
Abstract The sub-class of speech acts looked at here require specific conditions for their success, these being specified here, as are the situations which lead to back-firing of speech acts of commitment. There follows an examination of the verbs in English used to express commitment and of the slight differences in proposition and entailment present with these various verbs. The observance or non-observance of conversational maxims in connection with these speech acts is investigated for possible effects and illustrated with examples.
1) ‘On the nature of labial velar shift’, Journal of Phonetics (12), 1984, 345-54.
Abstract Labial velar shift is a common diachronic occurrence in various languages which in recent works on phonology has been captured by the reintroduction of the Jakobsonian feature 'grave'. The type of shift involved, the form and direction it takes is a matter which has received insufficient attention. The present study is an attempt to account for this shift by viewing manifestations of it in Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Uralic. The essential difference between lenition and labial velar shift (i.e. the phonotactic environment of the segments involved) is discussed. In all cases the acoustic (and hence auditory) similarity of the segments which undergo shifting is seen to be the triggerring factor.
9) ‘Exploring Early Modern English Medical Texts: Manual to EMEMT Presenter’ (with Jukka Tyrkkö and Ville Marttila) , in: Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds) Early Modern English Medical Texts. Corpus Description and Studies. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, 221-279).
This article offers information about how to explore the software interface which is supplied with the collection of Early Modern English Medical Texts in the book in question. There are many sample searches and discussions to help users become au fait with the programmatic possibilities of the accompanying software by Raymond Hickey.
8) ‘Tracking dialect history: A Corpus of Irish English’, in: Beal, Joan C., Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann Moisl (eds). Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Vol. 2, Diachronic Databases. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007, 105-126.
Abstract The current chapter offers an overview of the electronic text collection A Corpus of Irish English. It discusses the principles used in the choice and compilation of texts and details the text types to be found in the corpus. The chapter also discusses the uses to which such a corpus can be put, illustrating these with a few sample cases. There is also a general discussion of the problems and pitfalls of computer corpora and how they can be used to perhaps exclude certain matters from consideration through negative results. The assistance offered by corpora in re-examining, if not to say toppling, standard wisdoms is also considered.
7) ‘Processing corpora with Corpus Presenter’, ICAME Journal (24), 2000, 65-84.
Abstract The present article offers a description of the software package — Corpus Presenter — which the author has written and which is intended to render the processing of corpora as direct and simple as possible while offering a range of options which would make it attractive to linguists involved in either the compilation and/or the processing of corpora. Particular emphasis has been laid on the retrieval of information from corpora, especially for linguistic purposes. Provision has been made for the retrieval of syntactic information with frame searches. The processing of lexical information is facilitated by the availability of a number of database modules within the program suite. The Corpus Presenter package also allows tagging of corpora, in an automatic, semi-automatic or manual mode so that it can be useful to those linguists compiling corpora in which grammatical information is to be incorporated in advance of distribution. The means of linking existing corpora with the Corpus Presenter suite is described at the end of the article. For more information, see the dedicated website for Corpus Presenter (Version 13, July 2013).
6) Bergen CD-ROM Manager, 57 pages. (Bergen: Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities). [ This program is a file manager designed specifically for surveying the directories and files on the Bergen ICAME CD-ROM (first edition). ]
5) ‘A corpus of Irish English’, in: Merja Kytö, Matti Rissanen and Susan Wright (eds), Corpora across the centuries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993, 23-31).
Abstract This report gives an outline of the now completed Corpus of Irish English and describes the principles which informed the choice and collection of material. The corpus covers a time span from the late Middle Ages (the Kildare Poems and some minor pieces) through the glossaries for Forth and Bargy (early 19th century) and includes a representative selection of plays from the Restoration period to the present-day.
4) ‘Applications of software in the compilation of corpora" in: Merja Kytö, Matti Rissanen and Susan Wright (eds), Corpora across the centuries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993, 165-86).
Abstract Here an outline of the software package Lexa (Hickey 1993 and later) is given and typical applications of the programs are discussed, for instance normalisation of historical texts, tagging of corpus files, pattern searching through texts and the use of databases for processing lexical material.
3) ‘Lexa - Corpus Processing Software’, in: Merja Kytö, Manual to the diachronic part of the Helsinki corpus of English texts (Helsinki: Department of English, University of Helsinki, 68-9; 267-74).
Abstract This section of the manual for the Helsinki corpus offers a brief description of the Lexa software package (published by the University of Bergen in 1993) which was designed specifically for the processing of English historical corpora. The software has been superseded by the more powerful and sophisticated package Corpus Presenter.
2) ‘Corpus data processing with Lexa’, ICAME Journal (17), 1993, 73-95.
Abstract The present article offers an introduction to the software system Lexa which has been designed to facilitate the processing of corpus data. The main applications of the system, such as lexical analysis or information retrieval, are discussed with typical cases being examined. After a brief explanation of what files types can be handled by the Lexa suite the question of text categorization is looked at. Then a detailed presentation of automatic tagging is offered. Particular attention is given to the degree to which such operations can be customized to users' needs along with the transfer of textual data to a database environment for the purpose of constructing lexical databases. The article concludes with a selection of further applications of the program suite in the general field of corpus data processing.
1) ‘Proposals for a corpus database system for linguists’, Proceedings of the Anglistentag 1987. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989, 288-99).
Abstract The purpose of the present paper is to examine the demands which a linguist would make of a database management system which is to be used for managing linguistic corpora. The paper opens with a general review of types of computer and database management systems and looks at the task of doing lexicological work with personal computers. A test case of creating and managing a diachronic dictionary of English is discussed as a concrete application.
Checklist of dialect features, (ii) Glossary of terms, (iii) References.